October 20, 2023
“I was moved. Lily Gladstone’s performance won the movie for me. I felt her pain,” said Brenda Victoria Castillo, President & CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC). “Killers of the Flower Moon spotlights a dark time in the history of the Osage Nation. Audiences will experience a thought-provoking film that brings to life the continued history of Native abuse at the hands of colonizers.”
The best thing to come out of Killers of the Flower Moon is Lily Gladstone, who is being campaigned for an Academy Award Lead Actress nomination. If nominated, she will be the first Indigenous actress to achieve such success. That is not to say that there weren’t many good things to come out of this film. One of them being Rodrigo Prieto, the cinematopher of the film, who gives life to the Osage County landscape. Opposite Lily Gladstone are two of Hollywood’s elite, Academy Award winners, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film also includes Academy Award winner, Brendan Fraser, Academy Award nominees, Jesse Plemons, and John Lithgow, Tantoo Cardinal, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Cara Jade Myers, and many more.
Killers of the Flower Moon is being praised as Martin Scorsese’s most ambitious film yet and is his first Cannes submission in 40 years. Based on the novel of the same name by David Grann, this story follows the true murders of Osage Nation people at the hands of White men and their greed in the 1920’s.
At the turn of the 20th century, newfound oil led to a booming fortune for the Osage Nation. With this newfound wealth, came the attention of White interlopers who sought to extort and manipulate the Osage Nation’s people. Based on the true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), Killers of the Flower Moon depicts the history of serial murders of members of the Osage Nation. Better known from 1921 to 1926 as the “Reign of Terror”. The crimes sparked national attention that inevitably led to an F.B.I. investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.
Killers of the Flower Moon premieres exclusively in theaters today.
