Thunderheart

Michael Apted made this film and a documentary about the same events at once. He was preparing Incident at Oglala when the script arrived, and by his own account he could not believe it: a fictional version of the documentary he was shooting had landed on his desk. Both came out in 1992. The real event behind it: in 1975, two FBI agents were killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Four men were arrested and only one was tried and convicted. Leonard Peltier received two consecutive life sentences. The character Jimmy Looks Twice is loosely based on him and is played by the activist John Trudell. John Fusco wrote the screenplay and lived at Pine Ridge for five years researching it, witnessing the clashes between AIM and the GOONs first-hand. A young FBI agent who is part Native American and has suppressed it is sent to investigate a murder on the reservation. Val Kilmer plays the agent, Graham Greene the tribal police officer and Sam Shepard his superior. Who it is for: viewers who like a real political case told inside a genre thriller. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the Native story to sit at the centre. The film runs on a white agent's discovery of identity, a template that draws criticism now.