Bring Them Home / Iniskim

Three years after filming the Blackfeet buffalo drive – and a couple of years of festival screenings – we’re finally going to show the two films we shot to a wider audience. We’re lucky enough that Montana PBS has agreed to take them as a double feature – a rare thing for a television station to do with two short films – and then, from there, we’ll find a way to share the films with the wider world.

I’m really happy with how they turned out. Both of these projects were uncharted ground for me: Bring Them Home was the first experience-based documentary I’ve made and Iniskim was the first dramatic fiction short (and hybrid fiction/doc!) that I’ve ever made. Iniskim, in particular, was a challenge because we had to improvise the filming to fit the actual happenings of the buffalo drive (it was one actor in a sea of real people and 500 wild animals doing things we couldn’t control) and that we only had an outline for the film as we shot. We had to write the script in post, while we were editing.

The responses to these films have been great so far and both projects have led to feature films that we’re currently working on. I’m excited to share all of them with the world sometime soon, but for now, you can check out the trailers below.

Iniskim's trailer. Starring Alia Heavyrunner and featuring original music from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and award-winning composer Roger Suen.

Bring Them Home's trailer. A documentary about the Blackfeet Buffalo Drive.

Both of these projects were made possible in part by the Big Sky Film Grant.