Writer/director Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me is set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and focuses on the lives of the teenagers who inhabit it. Particularly the Winters children, Johnny (John Reddy) who wants to leave to Los Angeles to be with his girlfriend when she moves to college, his sister Jashuan (Jashaun St. John) who spends her time with older kids, perhaps dreading the inconveniences of youth. Their lives are captured with precision and tenderness by Zhao, who in her debut feature evokes conflicting emotions and multilayered dilemmas that force the audience to look beyond what they think they know about the Native American population. I spoke to Zhao about the film’s gorgeously intimate look, the effects of social media in the Reservation and capturing time differently.
You said in an interview that you wanted to “put the camera inside the characters” and at times the use of close ups was beautiful, and at other times felt invasive. Can you talk about setting up the shots with your DP and the overall look of the film?
It was very important to me, because in our media we tend to look at Native Americans from a distance, either as a subject matter, social issue or historic study. When I spent time in the Reservation it’s a very intimate experience, you go into people’s homes, it’s usually very crowded, it’s intense. We really wanted the audience to be there even if that’s uncomfortable sometimes. We wanted to make a film that was from the inside out, my DP spent a lot of time with, so he got to become very familiar with the actors. We decided to use very wide angle lenses, no zooms or anything, we wanted to be close to people physically, and see everything clearly behind them, because the film is about their relationship to their surroundings. Sometimes me and my DP without a monitor, would follow the actors, there was a lot of improvisation, and also we had such little money to make the movie, that it was a really small crew. We couldn’t afford to be far away from the action.
The film feels like it’s moving at a different speed, like time moves slower in the Reservation. Is that something you would say you experienced there, and something that you wanted to transmit in the film?
I’m really glad you asked that, because our film was shot without a script, so we had a lot of footage and we had to discover the pacing, and the story in the editing room. There was a lot of back and forth with people giving me advice, my mentors telling me to speed the film up because I could lose the audience. But one of the very important things for us is because of the way we shot it, there is so much truth in front of the camera, we only could afford to tell the truth, so we wanted to do it similarly in the editing room. There were dramatic moments I’d written that I had to remove, because the reality of what the young people are going through in the Reservation is the lack of these dramatic beats and these things that give NYC this adrenaline rush for instance. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or a good thing, but these lack of deadlines makes time in the Reservation move differently, the same way in which the untouched landscape affects people. If the weather is bad you stay home, so everything feels more to the nature than our human pacing, and it was very important for us to capture that.
Usually films about Native Americans deal with how desperate they are to leave the Reservation, but your film presents us with the rather surprising notion that staying isn’t bad either…
Leaving is hard, staying is hard. Not everyone gets the opportunity to move to NYC or LA, and there is a misconception of ”this is America” and this will be equal opportunity for everyone, but that’s not the case. And this goes beyond having money to move and leave the Reservation, for example some of the kids get scholarships and they can’t leave, they feel they won’t adjust to city life, because of their very strong connection to the land. This is a culture that’s very deeply rooted in family, and so I wanted to celebrate those who decide to stay.
We live in a time when people are constantly demanding that only this specific type of person, can tell this specific type of story. Do you find that there is a misconception when it comes to storytelling and “cultural appropriation”?
I think we can also, if we make a Chinese movie, I could have bad cultural appropriation, the filmmakers I admire tell stories of what they know. My curiosity drives me, I’m more interested in what I don’t know. What interested me growing up were American politics and I also studied racial relations. Our world more than ever is polarized, so I’m interested in what we have in common, beyond the language, history, race, politics. When I look for a story in a Reservation I want to find a story that’s universal, so that my parents who don’t speak English will feel like they’re trapped, and think of living in communist China for instance. More powerful for a narrative filmmaker, a story is a story, every culture has done that, we all share storytelling. As a Chinese person to tell a native American story is a good thing, I think more women should tell stories about men, men should tell stories about women...they just have to be somewhat responsible.
Social media was essential to the stories being told in your film, can you elaborate on how what we think of as a historically oral culture is using social networks?
Young people are like that, they see the world differently, they see everything through social media, they can capture images on their phone, Jashaun is doing social media next to me right now. It’s similar to being a teenager in China, when it opened up to the West, Jashuan’s generation is the first to have internet, so the cover is lifted, I feel the internet is a good thing for people in the Reservation. They learn more, the internet encourages them to learn more, seek popular media and rewrite their cultural identity, through the things they learned, saw... It’s interesting these people are creating what it’s like to be a modern Native American today.
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is playing at Film Forum.
