Martin Scorsese’s event film hits theaters this Wednesday, October 18 before landing on AppleTV. “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks back at the real massacre of the Osage community.
Spectators can discover Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters this Wednesday, October 18. This is a real event for movie buffs, since it is the last feature film by Martin Scorsese bringing together Robert de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, but also the revelation Lily Gladstone.
For this tense western, the 80-year-old American filmmaker chose to focus on a tragic true story that left the Native American community in mourning at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the massacre of the Osage Indians, which took place from 1918 to 1931, nicknamed by the press “the reign of terror”.
During this period, and more particularly from 1921 to 1926, around sixty Native Americans from the community of Osage (Oklahoma), wealthy since an oil deposit was discovered on their reservation, were killed in order to seize their wealth and regain control over their oil rights.
The figure rises if we consider other deaths deemed suspicious during this period. Nonetheless, most Osage Indian murders remain unsolved. Significant corruption was also detected among local officials who had the Indian community under their control.
Martin Scorsese explained to Osage News the reason why this film stood out in his mind, saying he was “attracted by this story in itself”. He has in fact decided to adapt David Grann’s best-seller of the same name as the film, believing that the fate of Native Americans is “a wound to be healed” for the United States.
“The questions are the same as today,” he explained during the presentation of the film at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 2023. “I hope that democracy will survive even though it is sometimes very fractured. But the country is still young, it still suffers from its youthful wounds. Maybe by knowing our history and understanding where we are, we can make a difference and live up to what our country is supposed to be.”
