“Dark Winds” star Jessica Matten has joined the cast of historical indie drama “Standing Bear.”
Matten will play Bird Song, the wife of Chief Standing Bear. She joins Chaske Spencer, who leads the project in the title role.
Andrew Troy, who is part Chiricahua Apache, is set to direct the film along with Jim Sheridan (“My Left Foot”).
The film tells the story of the Ponca Tribe’s harrowing forced removal on the Trail of Tears and the landmark 1879 trial of Standing Bear v. Crook, which secured recognition of Native Americans as “persons” under U.S. law — a precedent-setting civil-rights victory too often absent from American history books.
According to the synopsis, Matten will portray the historically identified Zazette (Susette) Primeau, daughter of Lone Chief/Antoine Primeau — wife of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, a central witness to her people’s ordeal during the forced removal of 1877. “A woman of quiet authority, she stood at the seam between homelands and exile, family grief and national awakening, helping carry a private promise into public history,” the synopsis says.
The screenplay written by Troy and Sheridan is based on the best-selling book “I Am a Man” by Joseph Starita.
The production is spearheaded by Troy Entertainment, in association with Sheridan’s Hell’s Kitchen Limited, and longtime Anonymous Content president Paul Green. René Haynes, whose credits include “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Wind River,” is the film’s casting director.
The film has garnered wide-ranging institutional and bipartisan governmental support, including endorsements from the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the Tyonek Native Corporation, the Athabascan Tribe, the State of Nebraska, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts, Governor Jim Pillen, and former Nebraska State Senators Burke Harr (Democrat) and Colby Coash (Republican) who have both joined the production as executive producers. Production is scheduled to begin in February.
The Ponca Tribe is developing a Standing Bear Museum and cultural center in Niobrara, at the site of its traditional homelands and the film’s shooting location.
Matten is repped by M88, Spencer by CESD, Troy by The Gersh Agency, and Sheridan is repped by WME.
