OKFS Presents: THUNDERHEART
Schedule
Thu, 20 Nov, 2025 at 07:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
Rodeo Cinema | Oklahoma City, OK
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What: Thunderheart (1992) dir. by Michael AptedWhen: Thursday, November 20th at 7pm
Where: Rodeo Cinema at 2221 Exchange Ave in the heart of the OKC Stockyards @rodeocinema
Tickets: rodeocinema.org
Every month the Oklahoma Film Society will bring you amazing films from across the cinematic spectrum. This month we’ll be joined by Oklahoma director Kyle Kauwika Harris to discuss the film.
ABOUT THE FILM: In Thunderheart, director Michael Apted transforms a murder mystery into a haunting meditation on identity, heritage, and the uneasy fault lines of American history. Inspired by real events on Native lands in the 1970s, the film follows FBI agent Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer), a man of mixed Sioux heritage, sent to investigate a killing on a South Dakota reservation. What begins as routine procedure soon unravels into a confrontation with his own ancestry and the legacy of government betrayal. Apted’s measured direction and Roger Deakins’s luminous cinematography imbue the plains and badlands with a mythic intensity, while Graham Greene’s quietly powerful performance grounds the story in moral clarity and cultural truth. Part political thriller, part spiritual awakening, Thunderheart bridges the traditions of the American western and the activist cinema of the 1970s, uncovering buried histories beneath the dust of the modern frontier. A work of empathy and resistance, Thunderheart remains one of the rare Hollywood films to grapple sincerely with Native sovereignty and the enduring struggle to reclaim identity from the margins of a myth.
Stick around after the screening for a short discussion about the film with Kyle Kauwika Harris!
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Where is it happening?
Rodeo Cinema, 2221 Exchange Avenue,Oklahoma City,OK,United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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