“Free Leonard Peltier,” the opening night feature for the 44th Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival sold out three theaters at The Main Cinema, and for good reason.

The powerful and timely documentary opened at MSPIFF just two months after former President Joe Biden granted clemency to the Native American activist during his final minutes in office.

Peltier, now 80, was imprisoned for 50 years for the murders of two FBI agents at the 1975 Pine Ridge Shootout, convictions that have been heavily disputed and, as the documentary demonstrates, entirely fabricated by the FBI.

“If you’re Native American in the United States, you know the story of Leonard Peltier,” Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of Indigenous rights organization NDN Collective, said in the film. 

The film has local significance, too. The American Indian Movement, of which Peltier was a member, was founded in Minneapolis in 1968.

Before the film began, Ojibwe drummers and a dancer performed, and another man said a prayer in the Ojibwe language.

The film begins with Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, and the  NDN Collective in the thick of the fight for Peltier’s last opportunity at parole before he was granted clemency.

The film documents the multi-generational struggle for Peltier’s freedom and the history of the larger AIM with a combination of vibrant archival footage from the 1970s, a 1999 interview with Peltier from prison and present-day interviews with still-living AIM activists.

“I’m very grateful for that generation,” director Jesse Short Bull said to the audience during the post-screening Q&A. “I’m proud to be Lakota and have a Lakota name.”

Short Bull leaves nothing to the imagination regarding the Native American struggle by including footage of boarding schools and first-hand accounts of the Pine Ridge Shootout, which created moments of intense emotional resonance.

Another moment showed Tilsen calling Peltier before his parole hearing from the house NDN Collective bought for Peltier upon his release.

“I’m just so excited, I’m having trouble speaking,” Peltier’s voice crackled through the phone. The people sitting next to me shed tears, as did I.

The real gut punch comes during the parole hearing itself, Peltier’s first in 15 years and, at the time, what many foresaw as his last chance at freedom.

With camera access denied in the courtroom — or rather, a waiting room at Federal Correctional Institution, Leavenworth in Kansas — Short Bull relied on plain white text of the transcript against a black background, interspersed with shots of the AIM activists staring silently into the camera as an FBI representative reiterates facts that everyone except the FBI had set aside.

“The truth didn’t matter,” Short Bull said. “They knew decades ago, and they still let Leonard suffer.”

Even with the writing on the wall, it’s still heartbreaking to hear a news anchor in the next scene announce Peltier’s parole denial.

This was the original ending of the film submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, but Short Bull and his film crew still went out to Leavenworth the morning of Jan. 20 with NDN Collective members with bated breaths waiting for Biden to pardon Peltier.

When the moment comes, eyes widen, victory cries are shouted and people hug, weep and look around in disbelief. A bald eagle glides through the clear blue sky above.

It’s a satisfying and hopeful ending, even though Peltier is serving the rest of his consecutive life sentences under house arrest and is living with severe degenerative scoliosis after half a century of sleeping on a two-inch-thick prison mattress, according to NDN Collective policy expert Holly Cook Macarro.

“They never quit trying (to punish him),” Cook Macarro, who was on the team working to secure Peltier’s freedom, said.

Still, Peltier’s defining quality is his resilience. 

The activist, his hair and mustache now white, appeared on the big screen after the Q&A in a pre-recorded message. His warmth was immediately noticeable, but so was his passion for protecting his people after all these years.

“We are sovereign nations, and we want our nationhood back,” he said. “I’m pleading with you, please help us.”

Peltier told the audience he hoped they enjoyed the film, even though some parts were difficult to watch.

“Sometimes you have to shock the audience to get them to react,” he said.

Viewers dropped their MSPIFF ballots in a brown paper bag as they left the theater. On a MSPIFF ballot, the viewer tears along a dotted line corresponding to a star rating out of five to rate the movie.

The majority of them were torn along the five-star line.