‘Free Leonard Peltier’ review: A 50-year fight for freedom gains momentum

Dirs: Jesse Short Bull, David France. US. 2025. 110mins

The injustice laid bare by this meticulously made and galvanising documentary runs much deeper than that faced by its subject, Leonard Peltier, an Amerian Indian Movemement (AIM) activist who was jailed in 1975 for the murder of two FBI agents during a shoot-out at Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota. While Jesse Short Bull and David France’s film is firmly anchored in Peltier’s story, it also uses his experience as a springboard to highlight the oppression, institutional racism and abuse faced by Native Americans.

 Highlights the oppression, institutional racism and abuse faced by Native Americans

France’s prior work includes the Oscar-nominated AIDS documentary How To Survive A Plague, while Short Bull has made the Indigenous rights film Lakota Nation vs. United States. They prove a powerful combination working in tandem here. The film had a timely world premiere at Sundance, only days after outgoing president Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence with just minutes remaining of his term  – a development the directors have reworked to include in time for its international premiere at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, but one which still leaves Peltier under house arrest. Its three wins there, including the Silver Alexander, bode well for securing a high-profile distribution deal.

The most recent chapter of Peltier’s 50-year fight for freedom bookends the film, highlighting the way in which the 80-year-old’s battle for justice has become embedded within the Native American community. As one campaigner puts it: “Many of us have been in this struggle for Leonard for generations of our family.”  The struggle has been mirrored onscreen too, with various narrative and documentary efforts over the years, the most high-profile being Michael Apted and Robert Redford’s collaboration on 1992’s Incident At Oglala (Apted also directed Thunderheart, a drama about the events at Pine Ridge.)

Having started the film in the present day, Short Bull and France spin back 35 years, immersing the viewer in archive footage and using early interviews with Peltier in prison as punctuation, showing not only how he jained on the flimsiest of evidence, but also the foundations of AIM’s activism. Peltier and many of his contemporaries, who appear in talking head interviews, ground the film in the history of the campaign for rights. 

They touch on subjects including the assimilation techniques of the residential boarding schools many Native Americans were forced to attend – explored in Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s  2024 documentary Sugarcane. They also outline the land-grab nature of an American government that was hungry for mineral mining at that time. The editing together of the archive and talking heads is slick and further energised by the score from Oglala Lakota artist Mato Wayuhi, its strong choral element reflecting the sense of community spirit that infuses the film.

The slow build to the confrontation at Pine Ridge, in which FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed alongside Native American Joe Stuntz, allows the directors to fully establish the context. The film makes the case that the tribal leader there, Richard Wilson, was “terrorising his own people” by setting up a vigilante army of sorts called Guardians of the Oglala Nation, which was supported and armed by the FBI and embraced its reputation as the ’GOON squad’. 

France previously used AI deepfake technology to protect the identities of participants in Welcome To Chechnya (2020), and AI is employed here to clean up archive voice recordings and to give voice to some of Peltier’s writing, with his permission. It is also used to recreate events on the deadly day. This ‘re-enactment’ element is rather generic in comparison to the genuine archive, but gives immediacy to the action. The first-person testimony is the most compelling aspect of the film, however.

After the deaths, Peltier became the only person to be convicted, although fellow AIM activists Bob Robideau and Dino Butler were also prosecuted and acquitted. France and Short Bull show how that development spurred a vindictiveness towards Peltier on the part of the FBI, which appears to endure to this day. The directors make a cast iron case for the defence, outlining issues from withholding evidence to dubious witnesses, along with a history of appeal and retrial knockbacks in the face of the facts. The Biden decision ensures a strong emotional conclusion, but any sense of resolution is undercut by the knowledge that Peltier has still not been granted full freedom.