Indian Territory Film Fest - Short Films

Indian Territory Film Festival returns to Circle Cinema on April 18, 2026 with an evening celebrating contemporary Indigenous Cinema. A program of short Indigenous-made films opens the event at 3 PM, followed by a reception at 5 PM and the Oklahoma Premiere of Eva Thomas’s Nika & Madison, a standout from 2025’s Toronto International Film Festival, at 7 PM. Q&As with the filmmakers follow both screenings.

Tickets sold separately, $7 for the short films and $7 for Nika & Madison. Short film tickets are available at this page. Click back to the film schedule or click the ticket hub link at the top of the page for Nika & Madison tickets.

Short Films - Sat 4/18, 3pm - Ticket includes filmmaker Q&A and admission to post-film reception

Join us for Global Indigenous Short Films curated by the 2026 Indian Territory Film Festival. This slate of short films showcase the stories and perspectives of Indigenous peoples and travel from the surreal to the animated and beyond. Click the Information button below for a full list.

Comedy, Science-Fiction, Animation, Drama

Run Time: 81 min. Shorts included:

My First Dance (2025) Dir. Erica Pretty Eagle

My First Dance was created for the exhibit “Reflections of Our People, Our Ways, Our Land” that features all Otoe-Missouria artists at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. It is a story of a young girl being brought into the circle for her first dance.

POW! (2025)  Dir. Joey Clift (Cowlitz)

A Native American kid scrambles to charge his dying video game console at a bustling intertribal powwow.

Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough (2025)  Dir. Sabrina Saleha (Navajo)

A Navajo/Bengali niece kneads to find dough-mestic harmony when her aunties burst into a frybread vs. roti showdown, forcing her to cook up her own recipe for belonging from all the ingredients of her culture.

Kusi Smiles (2025) Dir. Sisa Quispe (Quechua & Aymara)

Unable to sing, a Quechua teenager returns to her Andean community, where sisterhood, music, and the land that raised her guide her through grief toward healing.

Pidikwe/Rumble (2025) Dir. Caroline Monnet (Algonquin)

Featuring Indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future.

Evening Escapades (2024) Dir. Darcy Tara McDiarmid  (Han and Northern Tutchone), Chantal Rousseau

An adventurous rabbit undertakes an enchanted evening escapade through a mysterious forest trail. The rabbit encounters dreaming wolves, and other mischievous animals as he navigates a midnight mushroom garden.

Black Glass (2024)  Dir. Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk)

Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army’s war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron’s Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.

Mary Margaret Road Grader (2024) Dir. Steven Paul Judd (Choctaw/Kiowa)

In a post apocalyptic Indigenous future the ponies are iron, oil and gears. The scores are settled in the arena and may the best woman win.

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ITFF is generously sponsored by Choctaw Nation Cultural Center, Center for Poets and Writers, Cherokee Film, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy, Nevaquaya Fine Arts, Martin Scorcese Department of Cinema Studies, deadCenter Film Continuum and Allied Arts.

Indian Territory Film Festival is an official program of The Indian Territory Film Foundation. ITFF’s mission is to promote and celebrate Indigenous storytelling across all media. We foster not only past and present storytellers, but develop future storytellers through workshops and other training opportunities in order to share our culture, traditions and stories.