By John Serba
Published Oct. 12, 2026, 4:00 p.m. ET
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Free Leonard Peltier (now on Netflix) directors Jesse Short Bull and David France had to quickly amend their documentary prior to its Sundance Film Festival debut in January 2025. A week prior, the film’s subject, political prisoner Peltier, was released to house arrest after 50 years in prison after his life sentence, for the alleged killing of two FBI agents in 1975, was commuted by President Joe Biden on his last day in office. His release gave the story a new ending, a mostly happy one, although it concludes less with a period, more with dots of ellipsis.
FREE LEONARD PELTIER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Free Leonard Peltier dutifully sets the scene for Peltier’s story: In the 1960s, activist group the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought to raise awareness of the U.S. government’s attempts to dismantle American Indian culture. Officials separated Indian children from their families and forced them into boarding schools, where they were frequently abused; meanwhile, the government routinely broke treaties and forced people off Indian reservations in order to acquire the land’s valuable resources (e.g., the uranium required to produce atomic bombs). AIM protested by occupying Alcatraz Island, and taking over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building, where protesters found damning paperwork outlining the government’s unlawful land grabs.
Peltier was in the BIA building that day, having joined AIM in the early ’70s, radicalized by a stint in a cruel Indian boarding school. He was a key AIM member, in opposition to Dick Wilson, a tribal chairman whose private militia was likely supported by the U.S. government. That tension led to the fateful day at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1975, when FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler arrived on the land in unmarked cars, prompting a shootout. The agents were killed along with AIM member Joe Stuntz. After fleeing to Canada, Peltier was arrested, tried, and convicted for execution-style killings of the two FBI men.
Using interviews with key AIM leaders, lawyers, and journalists, Short Bull and France piece together a narrative outlining the U.S. government’s various malfeasances, ranging from gaming Peltier’s trial to its systematic oppression of American Indians in the 20th century. Widely believed to be the victim of federal railroading, Peltier became a political focal point for Indians, inspiring a movement to free him and further raise awareness of systemic prejudices. For 50 years, numerous attempts to fight his imprisonment failed, including lobbying President Bill Clinton to commute the sentence; Clinton said he’d free Peltier if he’d admit guilt, but Peltier held true to his principles. Another quarter-century would pass before Peltier set foot outside a prison.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In 1992, director Michael Apted released Peltier documentary Incident at Oglala, as well as Thunderheart, a dramatization of related events at Wounded Knee.
Our Take: Short Bull and France bookend the documentary with verite footage of American Indian lobbyists toiling to get Peltier released in 2024 and ’25; in between, they dutifully outline why the phrase “Free Leonard Peltier” became a ubiquitous rallying cry for five decades. To their credit, the directors here present a streamlined, easily digestible narrative from Peltier’s point-of-view. But by that token, the film tends to broaden him as a character –—outside brief moments with Peltier after his release, the doc relies on archival interviews with him, and we don’t get a full grasp of who he was as a person, or how he feels about being essentially a martyr for a greater cause.
Free Leonard Peltier also simplifies political entanglements, to the point that it leaves us thinking, “Well, what now?“as it doesn’t address current contextual implications of his release, and what it means for the American Indian community both pragmatically and symbolically. The material perhaps begs to be a miniseries. But as a general encapsulation of Peltier’s story, the doc is highly functional, avoiding overstatement and sticking to a measured tone, its emotions muted for the sake of developing a levelheaded argument; if there’s any subtext here, it’s that progress can be brutally, painfully slow. The result is a quietly damning portrait of the abuses these people have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government.
Our Call: Free Leonard Peltier is a rock-solid activist documentary, informative and thoroughly watchable. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.