The Chickasaw Nation is throwing open the doors of its 350-seat Anoli' Theater in Sulphur this Friday and Saturday for the 11th annual Holba' Pisachi' Native Film Festival, and this year's headliners are Hollywood-sized: Amber Midthunder, the star of the acclaimed Predator prequel Prey, and the film's producer, Jhane Myers, are both set to appear alongside a special screening of the movie.
The festival's name, Holba' Pisachi', translates to Showing Pictures in the Chickasaw language, according to the Chickasaw Cultural Center. The two-day event runs August 7 and 8 at the Chickasaw Cultural Center campus, and every screening and panel discussion is free and open to the public. As The Oklahoman reports, the Chickasaw Nation is hosting the festival to spotlight First American films and filmmakers, with this year's lineup built around the star and producer of Prey.
Prey's Groundbreaking Run Meets Sulphur's Big Screen
Prey, released in 2022, was produced by Comanche/Blackfeet filmmaker Myers and stars Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux actress Midthunder, and it made film history as the first major feature film ever fully dubbed in the Comanche language, per the festival's screening notes. The Oklahoman describes the film as a Predator sequel, and its cultural significance has followed it well beyond its initial release, including six Primetime Emmy nominations. Bringing both the lead actress and the producer to Sulphur in person gives festival-goers a rare chance to hear directly from the team behind one of the most talked-about Indigenous-led films of the last several years.
This year's theme, Indigenous Forces in Cinema: Empowering and Lifting Voices in Film, threads through the rest of the schedule as well. Also on the bill is the 2025 documentary Free Leonard Peltier, co-produced by Myers, which examines the five-decade effort to free the American Indian Movement activist and debuted at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, according to the Chickasaw Cultural Center. Regional filmmakers get their spotlight too, with screenings of Sandra L. Denney's The Dawes Commission, Blake Pickens' Reservation Redemption, and Camille Nighthorse's More Than Frybread rounding out a slate that mixes shorts, documentaries and filmmaker Q&As.
A Cultural Center Built for This Kind of Storytelling
The venue itself carries its own backstory. The 184-acre Chickasaw Cultural Center campus, built for $40 million and opened in 2010, welcomed its one-millionth visitor in October 2024, according to the center's own account relayed by Native News Online. The land underneath it traces back to the federal Chickasaw National Recreation Area Land Exchange Act of 2004, which authorized a three-way land swap between the Chickasaw Nation, the City of Sulphur and the National Park Service, with ground broken that September.
Hosting a film festival is only part of the tribe's investment in cinema. The Chickasaw Nation operates its own production arm, Chickasaw Nation Productions, which has made original feature films including Te Ata in 2016 and Montford: The Chickasaw Rancher in 2021 to preserve tribal history, both of which later landed on streaming platforms including Peacock and Netflix. The tribe has also built dedicated educational curricula around those films, aligning historical study guides with Oklahoma Academic Standards for social studies classrooms from elementary through secondary grades, according to the Chickasaw Source.
Taken together, the free two-day festival functions as more than a weekend of screenings. It fits into a broader push by the Chickasaw Nation to put Indigenous storytellers in front of an audience while also shaping how that history gets taught in Oklahoma classrooms.
