Open Season

As both an ally of the Northern Paiute tribe who lived and worked on their reservation for five years, and as a sexual assault survivor, Open Season is a truly personal story for me. When my writer and I first learned of the legal loophole Open Season is based on, we were horrified by how true and real this actually is. Over eighty percent of sexual violence against Native women is committed by white men, who do so with virtual criminal impunity. Furthermore, Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped than women of other races and that one in three Native women will be raped in their lifetimes.

These statistics are the direct result of the 1978 US Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish which ruled that no tribal government has criminal jurisdiction over non-Native people. Given that in almost all cases, the federal and state government refuses to prosecute on behalf of Native victims, this loophole has created a hunting ground on reservations - an “open season”. In our research, we even found forums titled “How to rape a woman and get away with it” on which reservations were listed as the best place to hit.

It’s quite difficult to shake this social horror once you learn about it and so as an activist filmmaker, I set out to make my MFA thesis film at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts about this very topic with the goal of affecting change. My writer and I collaborated with experts in the field, professors and advocates working on reservation grounds, along with Native American rape survivors to settle on the final shooting script. Additionally, we brought in two female Native American producers who were also film students to help us build our fictional tribe and reservation with an authentic eye and voice.

The development process took over six months and continued well after our project was greenlit through a highly competitive process that results in USC fully funding six thesis films per year. With a liquid budget of $12k and a subsidized budget of another $15-20k in labor and equipment, we were poised to tell a provocative film with high production value that could compete with professionally made films.

A filmmaker dedicated to using film as a tool for social change and a lover of thriller, I wanted Open Season to be a socially conscious thriller. By borrowing from classic thriller and horror tropes such as the rape revenge and combining that with socially forward themes of female empowerment, I landed on a tone that feels transformative but also thrilling and entertaining. I also wanted Open Season to be corrective in that while it highlights America’s racial demons, it does so in a way that doesn't represent Native Americans in the typical way “poverty porn” often does. Rather, I depict a middle-class household like many of those I encountered while living with the Paiute, that is culturally intact, located on a reservation that is easy to access by outsiders, and rich in environmental health.

So often poverty porn depicts Native communities as marginalized and impoverished to the point that one would just expect crime to happen there all the time. But not all reservations are like this. I wanted to subvert the stereotypical image of a reservation community while also showing that even on a healthy reservation, there is this ever-lingering threat because racism is so institutionalized in the very laws surrounding sovereignty in Indian Country. Moreover, I wanted to tell the story of a girl who takes this tragic thing that happens to her and finds a way, to use her mind and her body (on her terms) to get justice rather than exact revenge. To do that, was liberating for me personally given my own history of feeling so much powerlessness as a sexual assault survivor.

During my time as a graduate student at USC’s film school, I led the research and development department at USC’s Media Institute for Social Change (MISC). While at MISC I secured a grant to co-create an impact model (Her Impact Tool, or HIT) in partnership with MISC that measures the behavioral, attitudinal, and informational change socially conscious filmmakers have on their audiences. As a starting point, we used my previous film, Paya: The Water Story of the Paiute, to design the model.

My plan is to apply this completed HIT model to Open Season. The model is designed to begin where all great films do, in the festival circuit. So with this, I thank you for taking the time to read why I believe you should program my film. I hope you enjoy the film as much as my team and I did making it.