Leonard Peltier spent 48 years in federal prison for killings that the US government's own evidence eventually failed to support. On January 20, 2025, with 14 minutes left in his presidency, Joe Biden commuted Peltier's consecutive life sentences to house arrest — not a pardon, not exoneration, but a door cracked open after half a century. David France and Jesse Short Bull's documentary was already at Sundance, already finished, pointed at a very different ending. The commutation arrived while the cameras were still rolling outside the Florida prison. The film's core argument is structural, not emotional. France and Short Bull came in, as France puts it, as historians: not to solve who pulled the trigger, but to show what the trigger was protecting. Pine Ridge Reservation, where the 1975 FBI shootout killed agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams and AIM member Joe Stuntz (whose death produced no arrest, ever), sat atop some of the richest uranium deposits in the United States. The day of the shootout, corrupt tribal chairman Dick Wilson — backed by the BIA and his own private paramilitary force, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation — unilaterally ceded one-eighth of the reservation to the federal government. The film does not call this a coincidence. Short Bull, who is Oglala Lakota, brings something France couldn't: the inside knowledge that Peltier's name was simply ambient — "said on the daily, like the sky is blue" — long before Short Bull understood the specifics. That generational texture matters. The first half of the film is almost entirely archival: elderly AIM members recounting the boarding schools, the forced evictions, the BIA building occupation in 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan to Washington. It's dense and occasionally exhausting, but it earns the second half. The second half is where the documentary finds its urgency. The litany of prosecutorial misconduct is staggering assembled in sequence: extradition secured via fabricated testimony from a woman Peltier had never met, who later recanted under claims of coercion; a trial presided over by a judge described as a known racist in North Dakota; FBI ballistic evidence later revealed to be unreliable; co-defendants Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, tried separately and allowed to argue self-defense, acquitted. In 1984, FBI firing pin tests demonstrated that Peltier's AR-15 didn't fire the shots that killed the agents. The conviction stood anyway. Peltier's quote on offers to plead guilty is the moral center of the film: "They've been saying for 46 years there's overwhelming proof against me, and now they want me to plead guilty? No, that's not going to happen." France is the veteran here — his previous documentaries include How to Survive a Plague and Welcome to Chechnya, both works that found the human story inside mass institutional failure. Free Leonard Peltier operates in that same register: the individual case as a window onto the systemic. Where it differs is that Short Bull's presence gives the film a Native interiority those earlier works couldn't claim. The film isn't performed solidarity; it's built from within the community it's about. The final sequences — Peltier at home, surrounded by family, still noting that house arrest is not freedom, still saying "I'm still battling for total freedom" — resist the neat catharsis the commutation might have provided. The film is honest that this is not resolution. Peltier's treaties argument, delivered over Zoom, lands with contemporary weight: the Trump administration's 2025 plan to build 62 miles of border wall through Tohono O'odham Nation without tribal consent runs in the background of every forward-looking statement the film makes. What France and Short Bull have made is not a courtroom thriller or an activist broadsheet. It's closer to historical testimony — the kind of film that exists because a generation is dying and the record needed to be set before it was lost. Whether Netflix's release on Indigenous Peoples' Day is a principled choice or a marketing alignment is a fair question. Either way, the film is there now, and it's the most complete account of the Peltier case assembled on screen.
