War Pony
War Pony, the debut from Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, is a soulful, empathetic look at two teens making their way on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota
A first-time directorial effort for Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, and shot with a largely non-professional cast drawn from South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota community, War Pony is an impressively accomplished piece of filmmaking and a quietly captivating film.
It portrays life on the Pine Ridge Reservation through the eyes of a young boy named Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and a young man named Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) as they try to find something to do in a portion of America that has been pushed off to the side. Both of the leads make for exciting discoveries – Whiting in particular carries himself with a dozy charm that makes his rudderless, unreliable character hard to dislike even when he’s stealing poodles or screwing over his baby mamas.
Bill takes a job with a sleazy white farmer while Matho starts selling drugs on the school ground and both of them soon start to seem bound for tragedy. The longer their two stories are kept apart, the more we start to dread the way in which they will be brought crashing together. But rather than using their hardships as a source of misery porn or contorting them into an “inspirational” tale, War Pony simply delivers an authentic, empathetic portrait of a particular way of life. The result is a film that is both unflinchingly gritty and wistfully dreamlike, mischievously funny and achingly melancholy. A film that feels alive in a full, unfiltered way.
Released 9 Jun by Picturehouse; certificate 15