*POSTER COMING SOON
BIOGRAPHY Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image. As a film programmer, he has served as a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Film Programming Team since 2013 and was also previously the Assistant Film Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and he has guest-curated film programs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF Lightbox, the Autry Museum of the American West, Metrograph, and various other film festivals and venues. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection's Current, MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope Magazine, the Metrograph Journal, and CNN. |
FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2027
ADAM PIRON PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, March 3rd - 6pm Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond Halplate (2020) (w/ Adam Khalil) A psychedelic portrait exploring epistemologies of Seminole alligator wrestlers. Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century. As the practice has changed over the years, Halpate profiles the hazards and history of the spectacle through the words of the tribe's alligator wrestlers themselves and what it has meant to their people's survival. Yaangna Plays Itself (2022) An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center of Yaangna, the Indigenous Gabrieleno village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River. Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image) (2023) The likeness of a relative of the filmmaker surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. A U.S. Army post in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s own Western expansion. In Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image), Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time and geography and in the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the ongoing and increasingly rapid circulation of images. Black Glass (2024) 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. The Early Sun Red as a Hunter’s Moon (2025) The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with “hieroglyphic script” that arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory. The Flesh of the Mountain (2026) The ragged, desolate landscapes around eastern California’s Owens Lake are rendered in negative monochrome in the latest entry in Adam Piron’s film cycle about the brutal history of Indigenous land expropriation in the American West. Deploying images from Thomas Edison’s 1894 films of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, The Flesh of the Mountain recounts the violent legacy of white settlers’ claim upon Paiute lands for the mining of silver—an essential component of motion-picture film. PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, March 4th - 6pm Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond Powwow People (2025, 88 minutes) Directed by Sky Hopinka Produced by John Cardellino & Adam Piron Powwow People is a vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering. Rather than entering as outside observers, the filmmakers organized the powwow itself, inviting dancers, singers, vendors, and community members to participate in the making of this film. Structured around the arc of a single day, the film follows four central figures: Gina Bluebird, who frames the powwow’s shape and guides its setup; Ruben Littlehead, the MC whose presence anchors the present moment; Jamie John, a non-binary dancer imagining the future of these traditions; and Freddie Cozad, a singer and drummer who considers the past. The film culminates in a 30-minute unbroken shot of a Northern Traditional dance special, drawing the viewer into the textures, movement, and collective presence of the powwow. It is both a reflection of a beloved and complicated community and a gesture toward the continuities of Native life. |