# The 16 Best Films by Native American Directors

> Sundance breakouts sit beside films that barely reached theaters, and a few of these directors appear more than once. Comedies, documentaries and slow-burn dramas all count here.

*By YPB Team · Published November 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-16-best-films-by-native-american-directors*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Naturally Native**
   Valerie Red-Horse and Jennifer Wynne Farmer's drama about three Native American sisters raised in foster care who start a cosmetics business; it premiered at Sundance in 1998 and was financed by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
2. **Smoke Signals**
   Chris Eyre's 1998 film from Sherman Alexie's screenplay about two young Coeur d'Alene men travelling to Phoenix; it won the Audience Award at Sundance.
3. **Edge of America**
   Chris Eyre's 2003 Showtime film about a Black English teacher who takes over a girls' basketball team at a reservation high school in Utah.
4. **The Business of Fancydancing**
   Sherman Alexie's 2002 directorial debut about a gay Spokane poet who returns to the reservation for a childhood friend's funeral.
5. **The Doe Boy**
   Randy Redroad's 2001 drama about a Cherokee teenager with hemophilia in Oklahoma whose first hunt ends with him shooting a doe.
6. **Four Sheets to the Wind**
   Sterlin Harjo's 2007 debut about a young Native man who leaves rural Oklahoma for Tulsa after his father's death; Tamara Podemski won a Sundance Special Jury Prize for her role.
7. **Barking Water**
   Sterlin Harjo's 2009 road movie in which a dying man and his former lover drive across Oklahoma so he can see his daughter.
8. **Mekko**
   Sterlin Harjo's 2015 drama about a Muscogee man released after 19 years in prison who ends up homeless on the streets of Tulsa.
9. **This May Be the Last Time**
   Sterlin Harjo's 2014 documentary about Muscogee Creek hymns and the 1962 disappearance of his grandfather.
10. **Drunktown's Finest**
   Sydney Freeland's 2014 debut following three young Navajo people whose lives cross near Gallup, New Mexico.
11. **Wild Indian**
   Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.'s 2021 thriller starring Michael Greyeyes as an Ojibwe man whose childhood killing of a classmate follows him into adulthood.
12. **Frybread Face and Me**
   Billy Luther's 2023 coming-of-age film about a boy who spends the summer of 1990 at his grandmother's ranch on the Navajo Nation.
13. **Rez Ball**
   Sydney Freeland's 2024 Netflix sports drama about the Chuska Warriors, a high school basketball team on the Navajo Nation.
14. **Deidra & Laney Rob a Train**
   Sydney Freeland's 2017 Netflix comedy about two sisters who start robbing freight trains after their mother is jailed.
15. **The Cherokee Word for Water**
   A 2013 drama co-directed by Charlie Soap and Tim Kelly about Wilma Mankiller and the rural Cherokee community that built its own water line.
16. **Fancy Dance**
   Erica Tremblay's debut feature starring Lily Gladstone as a woman searching for her missing sister on a Seneca-Cayuga reservation; it premiered at Sundance in 2023.

Tags: movies, directors, independent film, native american, indigenous