INDIAN TERRITORY FILM FESTIVAL
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Short Films | 3:00 - 9:00 PM
Circle Cinema
10 S Lewis Ave. Tulsa, OK 74104
Indian Territory Film Festival returns to Circle Cinema on April 18, 2026, with an evening celebrating contemporary Indigenous Cinema.
A program of short Indigenous-made films opens the event at 3 PM, followed by a reception at 5 PM and the Oklahoma Premiere of Eva Thomas’s Nika & Madison, a standout from 2025’s Toronto International Film Festival, at 7 PM. Q&As with the filmmakers follow both screenings.
Tulsa Artist Fellowship is committed to making the arts accessible to all. Ticket subsidies are available—contact support@tulsaartistfellowship.org.
This slate of short films (Comedy, Science Fiction, Animation, Drama) showcases the stories and perspectives of Indigenous peoples and ranges from the surreal to the animated and beyond. Click the Information button below for a full list.
Run Time: 81 min. Shorts included:
My First Dance (2025) Dir. Erica Pretty Eagle
My First Dance was created for the exhibit “Reflections of Our People, Our Ways, Our Land” that features all Otoe-Missouria artists at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. It is a story of a young girl being brought into the circle for her first dance.
POW! (2025) Dir. Joey Clift (Cowlitz)
A Native American kid scrambles to charge his dying video game console at a bustling intertribal powwow.
Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough (2025) Dir. Sabrina Saleha (Navajo)
A Navajo/Bengali niece kneads to find dough-mestic harmony when her aunties burst into a frybread vs. roti showdown, forcing her to cook up her own recipe for belonging from all the ingredients of her culture.
Kusi Smiles (2025) Dir. Sisa Quispe (Quechua & Aymara)
Unable to sing, a Quechua teenager returns to her Andean community, where sisterhood, music, and the land that raised her guide her through grief toward healing.
Pidikwe/Rumble (2025) Dir. Caroline Monnet (Algonquin)
Featuring Indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future.
Evening Escapades (2024) Dir. Darcy Tara McDiarmid (Han and Northern Tutchone), Chantal Rousseau
An adventurous rabbit undertakes an enchanted evening escapade through a mysterious forest trail. The rabbit encounters dreaming wolves and other mischievous animals as he navigates a midnight mushroom garden.
Black Glass (2024) Dir. Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk)
Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army’s war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron’s Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.
Mary Margaret Road Grader (2024) Dir. Steven Paul Judd (Choctaw/Kiowa)
In a post-apocalyptic Indigenous future, the ponies are iron, oil, and gears. The scores are settled in the arena, and may the best woman win.
Nika & Madison (2025) Dir. Eva Thomas (Walpole Island First Nation)
Drama / Thriller. Run Time: 87 min.
The ticket includes a pre-film reception and a post-film Q&A with the filmmaker in attendance.
Film content includes police violence and sexual assault.
In this tense and emotionally charged story, two childhood friends find themselves testing their resilience and loyalty in an ultimate fight for justice. Madison, a University of Toronto student, is sharp and career focused while Nika prefers the solitude and simplicity of life on the reservation. During a weekend back home, Nika rescues Madison from a sexual assault by a policeman, but the violent encounter leaves the officer critically injured. Fearing they won’t be believed, the Indigenous women go on the run; first seeking refuge on the reserve and then deep into the wilderness, until they’re chased back to the city. Two sharp-eyed detectives begin to uncover the truth, but when the case involves one of their own, the justice system reveals its deeply ingrained biases, blurring the lines between right and wrong.
ABOUT INDIAN TERRITORY FILM FESTIVAL
Indian Territory Film Festival is generously sponsored by Choctaw Nation Cultural Center, Center for Poets and Writers, Cherokee Film, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy, Nevaquaya Fine Arts, Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, deadCenter Film Continuum, and Allied Arts.
Indian Territory Film Festival is an official program of The Indian Territory Film Foundation. ITFF’s mission is to promote and celebrate Indigenous storytelling across all media. We foster not only past and present storytellers, but also develop future storytellers through workshops and other training opportunities to share our culture, traditions, and stories.