Cherokee Filmmaker Brit Hensel Secures Place in Sundance Film Festival History

Tulsa-based filmmaker Brit Hensel enjoys telling Cherokee stories. She’ll be sharing one of those stories with a Sundance audience.

Hensel’s third and newest film “ᎤᏕᏲᏅ (What They’ve Been Taught)” has been selected for the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and will make its world premiere as part of the short film program. She is the first woman who is a citizen of Cherokee Nation to direct an official selection at the festival.

“It’s pretty crazy,” Hensel said of the historic accomplishment. “I guess it is sort of shocking, the idea that it has taken this long for it to happen. But I feel really honored. I try not to think about it too much because it’s an awesome accomplishment and I’m really proud to have done work that people think of in that regard. I’m really, really honored to help share our stories and get a Cherokee story out on that platform and share it with people.”

Unlike 2021, Circle Cinema is not a satellite site for Sundance. But Circle Cinema will host a Saturday, Jan. 22 screening of “ᎤᏕᏲᏅ.” A reception will take place in the lobby from 2 p.m. until 2:45 p.m. and the film will follow at 3 p.m. Tulsa filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, co-creator of “Reservation Dogs,” will introduce the film and Hensel will take part in a Q&A session after the film.

Tickets are available in person at the Circle Cinema box office for the free screening, sponsored by Nia Tero and Crazy Eagle Media, a Tulsa-based TV and film company created by Harjo. Circle Cinema will add additional theaters, minus the Q&A, if necessary in order to accommodate audiences safely at 50% capacity.

Hensel and her sister Taylor (a producer on the film) grew up in Colorado, but their roots are in Oklahoma. Hensel said her mother is from Broken Arrow and her father’s side of the family is from Porum.

Hensel returned to Oklahoma during summers to visit relatives and got a reason to join them here when she accepted a job as a producer and director on the Emmy-winning series “Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People.”

“I did that for about a year and it was just awesome to be working in the community and spending time with Cherokee people and building relationships with folks,” Hensel said. “After that, I definitely knew I wasn’t going to leave Oklahoma and was just like, all right, I guess I’m going to do my own thing.”

Hensel got a gig in the camera department (camera utility) on the critically acclaimed shot-in-Oklahoma series “Reservation Dogs” and jumped into freelance work.

She has been making films since collaborating with her sister on 2017’s “Native and American,” which explores identity through the lens of a young Potawatomi woman as she navigates the tribe’s blood quantum standards.

Bitten by the “documentary bug,” Hensel continued with 2019’s “Zibi Yajdan,” which tells the story of the Kalamazoo River and its relationship to the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Pottawatomi people (Gun Lake Tribe) in the wake of the Enbridge Pipeline 6B oil spill.

Now Hensel is a 2022 Tulsa Artist Fellow with a Sundance-bound film. She said she knew that the film (made with Keli Gonzales, a Cherokee artist from Welling, Okla.) was being submitted, but she resisted checking online for updates about a verdict.

“I really just put it out of my mind,” she said. “If it happens, it happens.”

Hensel said she was shocked when she got the Sundance call and she immediately called her “team” to share the good news.

There’s no reason for the team to go to Park City because the festival will be virtual this year. Sundance was going to be a hybrid in-person and virtual event, but the omicron variant of COVID-19 caused the in-person aspect to be nixed.

Hensel said she got the opportunity to make the Sundance qualifier thanks to Nia Tero, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization that works in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and movements worldwide. She said Tracy Rector from Nia Tero had an idea to do a series of films — multiple Indigenous filmmakers from multiple communities who will share their community’s ideas around reciprocity.

Hensel’s film explores expressions of reciprocity in the Cherokee world, brought to life through a story told by an elder and first-language speaker. It is one of seven films from season one of Reciprocity Project, a co-production of Nia Tero and Upstander Project in association with REI Co-op Studios, which is working to create a paradigm shift that reframes our relationships to the Earth, other living beings and one another.

Asked about her passion for telling Cherokee stories, Hensel said, “It’s not something I’m able to separate from ourselves. It’s my identity. It’s who I am as a person. It’s the people I come from, the community I come from. And so it’s sort of my way to contribute to moving our culture and our people forward through storytelling. That’s the gift that I can use to give back to my community and help do my part.”

Hensel said she wants to create films and share Cherokee stories that people perhaps haven’t heard before — or do it in a way that people aren’t used to seeing.

“I think that we’ve got a really long way to go in terms of accurate Native representation in media and in storytelling. Mostly I’m just excited about working with my community and with as many Cherokees as possible, helping people who want to learn how to make films. There were nine of us on this project and some of them had never made a film before. It was their first time. It was pretty awesome, the shorthand that we had, just being an all-Cherokee team. We could really work off of each other in a way that I hadn’t experienced before in my previous work and other films and things like that. It was pretty awesome.”

Maybe telling Cherokee stories is Hensel’s calling? She responded by talking about a Cherokee value — ᏗᏣᎵᎪᎯ ᎢᏤᎮᏍᏗ/ditsaligohi itsehesdi. She provided the Cherokee translation in English: “You all gang up on work whenever and wherever it arises.”

Said Hensel: “As Cherokee people, we are supposed to be contributing our part to help the greater whole. I definitely think that’s why I’m here is to use my skills to help support and celebrate the community that I come from. I feel like that’s a life well spent and what I hope to keep doing.”