Hail to the Breadsticks!

Special one-night only screening with director Donick Cary joining for a zoom Q&A after the film! Tickets on sale soon.

Presented in support of Native American Heritage Month - look for more info about additional Native films and events throughout November coming soon.

About the film: 1h30min - Documentary - Not Rated - English

Donick Cary has been a huge fan of the Washington D.C. football team since before he could walk; passed down from his dad, he was excited to pass the tradition onto his kids. Donick never questioned the team name until his 9-year-old son, Otis, asked him if it was racist. When Otis suggests they ask Native Americans how they feel, it sends the two on a cross-country journey full of unexpected revelations.

Hail to the Breadsticks! follows multiple perspectives throughout its story: the innocent questioning of a 9-year-old non-Native boy, the open-minded inquiries of a sports super-fan, and most importantly, a broad swath of Native America. While Donick and Otis' journey provides the spine to the story, the stars of the film are the more than 60 Native Americans they talk to: artists, writers, athletes, and leaders, including former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange (Cheyenne, Arapaho), Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo (Seminole, Muscogee Creek), the late Graham Greene (Oneida), Taboo (Shoshone, Hopi, Mexican), Redbone’s Pat Vegas (Shoshone, Yoeme), Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa, Choctaw), Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe), Stevie Salas (Mescalero Apache), and Joey Clift (Cowlitz), among many others. The movie features interviews with Ice T, Hank Azaria, Hari Kondabolu and legends of Washington football, Charles Mann and George Starke (African American, Mohawk). While the movie tackles complicated subjects it is also full of laughs featuring comedic interstitials and an animated “Simpsons-like” cartoon — altered enough to avoid a lawsuit!

The film begins with a simple question about a sports mascot, then quickly moves onto bigger, thornier issues like erasure, invisibility, and representation. The solution: let Native Americans tell their own stories. Hail to the Breadsticks! takes a respectful, though still irreverent look at modern Native American identity in its myriad complexity to make the plight of what is often called an "invisible minority" a little bit more visible.

After the film, director Donick Cary will join over zoom to take questions from the audience. Donick Cary is an Emmy-winning writer, producer, and director whose credits include The Simpsons, Parks and Recreation, Silicon Valley, and New Girl; former head writer, Late Show with David Letterman. His first documentary, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, premiered on Netflix in 2020.