NEW YORK, UNITED STATES.- The film “The Moon Killers”, whose preview took place on Wednesday night in New York and which talks about the deaths of Amerindians a hundred years ago in the United States, is a story “ millennial” and universal, a “clash of cultures,” filmmaker Martin Scorsese told AFP.
At a red carpet evening at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, the American writer David Grann, whose book of the same title was adapted to the big screen by Scorsese, told AFP that “Killers of the Flower Moon” (such as the original name of the film) denounces the “genocidal crimes” of indigenous peoples by white Americans at the beginning of the 20th century.
Presented out of competition at the Cannes Festival last May, this 3h26 long, $200 million fresco, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, opens in theaters in the United States on October 20, before be available on the Apple TV+ platform.
Oil-rich Osage tribe
“The Moon Killers” is about what happened in the early 1920s in the lands of the Osage people, in Oklahoma, central United States, after oil was discovered, an event that brought wealth to the people but above all destruction.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a man in love with an indigenous woman (actress Lily Gladstone) who finds himself in the middle of a plot hatched by cattle magnate William Hale (played by De Niro), eager to increase his fortune with the oil.
An FBI agent played by Jesse Plemons is in charge of solving a series of strange deaths among the native population.
“It’s about a clash of cultures, a mutual misunderstanding, a feeling of entitlement,” Scorsese explained.
The 80-year-old New York filmmaker of Italian origin, who describes himself as “Euro-American,” stated that the “Americans there (in Oklahoma) were mainly European.”
The violence and murders evoked in the film “can occur today anywhere in the world. It is a story that is perpetuated through the centuries,” said the filmmaker, who filmed this blockbuster on the Oklahoma prairies with the participation of about forty Osage Indians.
David Grann, journalist and writer for the cultural magazine The New Yorker, maintained that both his book, published in 2017, and Scorsese’s film tell “the story of one of the most monstrous crimes and racial injustices perpetrated by white settlers against the indigenous peoples for oil money.”
“When greed is mixed with the dehumanization of other peoples, it leads to these genocidal crimes,” he said.
Grann thinks the history and dramatic destiny of the Osage tribe have been “largely erased from the collective consciousness” of America.
“It wasn’t taught in any of my school books, I never learned it,” he lamented in conversation with AFP.
At his side on the red carpet, the chief of the Osage Nation Geoffrey Standing Bear denounced that both the “Osage people and other indigenous peoples have had a very hard life for 500 years.”
“And the film shows that it continues to happen,” he added.
According to official data, there are today in the United States about 6.8 million “native” or “autochthonous” indigenous people, 2% of the population. Since 2021, by decree of Democratic President Joe Biden, every second Monday in October the country celebrates the “National Day of Indigenous Peoples.”
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2023-09-28 19:11:07
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