Lily Gladstone Plays a Queer Role in the Upcoming Movie Fancy Dance

Apple TV+

Fancy Dance, the highly anticipated movie starring Lily Gladstone in a queer role, finally has a release date.

In February, Variety reported that Apple Original Films acquired the rights to Fancy Dance, though a release date had yet to be announced. On Wednesday, Gladstone announced on social media that the film would be coming to select theaters on June 21, and would land on Apple TV+ on June 28.

In an Instagram caption, the actor, who uses she and they pronouns, wrote that they “have never been prouder or more excited to announce… well… just about anything!” Additionally, Gladstone called the film “a love letter to Indigenous women and the love we carry for our people.”

“Our matriarchs have always done whatever it takes to hold us together in a world that is often crafted to pry us apart; from our languages, our children, and for far too many of our relatives, from life itself,” she wrote. “In spite of it all, we are here…so we dance.”

The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023 to rave reviews from critics. The directorial debut of Seneca-Cayuga filmmaker Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance follows Jax (Gladstone), who has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) since her sister disappeared, according to IMDB. Jax spends her spare time looking for her missing sister and helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. But Jax’s father Frank could gain custody of Roki, leading the two to try to find Roki’s mother in time for the powwow.

Queerness is also inseparable from the texture of the film, as Tremblay told Outfest in an interview last July. The director talked about how she wove her own experiences as a queer person and as a former sex worker and stripper into Fancy Dance, stating that she used her own experiences to portray “positive, consensual queer sex work, which exists and we never see.”

Decolonizing gender means honoring Native knowledge systems and undoing the western gender binary. Here’s what you need to know.

She also told Outfest that she wanted Jax’s queerness “to not be the source of any specific struggle or the source of any specific trauma and that her being queer was just a part of her, like being native or a part of her, like being a hustler or part of her, like being a loving aunt.”

“It just exists as opposed to being this thing that we’re really taking a magnifying glass to and I think it was kind of freeing in a way to have a queer character whose plot of the film has nothing specifically to do with that,” she said.

Gladstone is fresh off an Oscar nomination for her critically acclaimed performance as Mollie Kyle in 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Then when the actor brought the concept of decolonizing gender to the mainstream in an interview with People, they immediately became one of our queer faves. Combined with what seems like an incredible script, we can’t wait to see Fancy Dance on the big screen.

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Originally Appeared on them.