"It gets in your blood," says a resident of Picher, Oklahoma about his sense of hometown pride. His words, however, take on a powerful irony in this documentary about the toxic legacy of Picher's lead mining industry. Since their town was declared a Superfund site in 1981, Picher's residents have been forced to choose between preserving their image of the American dream and preserving their health. The Creek Runs Red carries us into the heart of this sharply divided community to reveal with extraordinary intimacy and insight the full human tragedy of environmental catastrophe.
Oklahoman
For more than a century, cinema has been a favored American way to tell stories of different peoples and cultures.
But the mainstream movie industry hasn t always treated Native American stories fairly or authentically. If you look at Native representation in history, it s been pretty bad. So, almost showing any truthful, real version of Native people is humanizing. . I think anytime we show Native people kind of on their terms and in their environments, we re humanizing (them) on the screen and we re changing the narrative that history has kind of laid on us history and Hollywood, said Sterlin Harjo, a Seminole and Muscogee (Creek) filmmaker, native Oklahoman and film festival favorite, in a 2020 interview.