Still image from the film Sisters Rising, courtesy of Women Make Movies

Please join us for a virtual screening of the film Sisters Rising by filmmakers Willow O’Feral and Brad Heck. Tickets to this event will be available on January 14–18, 2021. Visit the Eventbrite page for more information. After the virtual screening of Sisters Rising, attend a discussion with filmmaker Willow O’Feral.

Willow O’Feral is the award-winning director, producer, and cinematographer of two feature documentary films, Break the Silence: Reproductive & Sexual Health Stories and Sisters Rising. Break the Silence was awarded the 2018 Choice Champion Award from Planned Parenthood of New England, and the 2019 Best Documentary Feature Award at La Frontera Queer Film Festival. Sisters Rising premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2020 where it won the Honorable Mention Award. O’Feral was a Fledgling Fellow at the 2018 DX Investigative Film Festival in Washington DC. She is a member of New Day Films, the longest running distribution cooperative for independent documentary filmmakers in the US, and a co-founder of Haptic Pictures, a production company producing beautiful original content around pressing issues of social justice.

Sisters Rising is the story of six Native American women fighting to restore personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States.

Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault than all other American women. One in three Native women report having been raped during her lifetime and 86% of the offenses are committed by non-Native men. These perpetrators exploit gaps in tribal jurisdictional authority and target Native women as ‘safe victims.’ The film follows six women who refuse to let this pattern of violence continue in the shadows—a tribal cop in the midst of the North Dakota oil boom, an attorney fighting to overturn restrictions on tribal sovereignty, a teacher of Indigenous women’s self-defense, grassroots advocates working to influence legislative change, and the author of the first anti-sex trafficking code to be introduced to a reservation’s tribal court. Their stories shine an unflinching light on righting injustice on both an individual and systemic level.

Sisters Rising is an urgent call to action, a gorgeous portrait of powerful women acting in solidarity, and a demand for tribal sovereignty and self-determination as the necessary step towards ending violence against Native women.

For more information, please contact MoCNA Senior Manager of Museum Education Winoka Yepa (Diné) at (505) 428-5907 or winoka.yepa@iaia.edu.