
Oscar-winning writer and director Taika Waititi has signed on to executive produce Frybread Face and Me. Waititi, who is Maori, has made it a priority to tell stories focused on Indigenous characters. His second feature in the director’s chair, 2010’s Boy, tells a coming-of-age story focused on a Maori pre-teen with elements of the story drawing from his own life. Waititi has also made an effort to include Maori actors into his movies, with New Zealanders Julian Dennison, Rachel House, and Rima Te Wiata appearing in Hunt for the Wilderpeople and, in House’s case, Thor: Ragnarok, too.
Now, Waititi will lend his power as an executive producer to Frybread and Me, a feature film from Billy Luther, a Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo writer and director. Per Variety, Luther’s Frybread Face and Me was one of the 10 projects selected as part of 2020 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs. The film tells the story of “two adolescent Navajo cousins from different worlds who bond during a summer herding sheep on their grandmother’s ranch in Arizona while learning more about their family’s past and themselves.”
