As we look toward the evolving landscape of science-cinema, Adam Piron offers a vital countercurrent — a filmmaker and curator who reclaims the image from the long shadow of the colonial gaze. A member of the Kiowa and Mohawk nations, Piron approaches archives not as sealed containers but as volatile, breathing entities where memory is constantly being unsettled and recomposed. His presence feels deeply attuned to the spirit of the Science New Wave, where fragments, data, myth, and lived experience intermingle, and where new cinematic forms appear precisely by confronting what history has obscured.
Still from Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)
Still from Black Glass
The films gathered in this spotlight trace this ethos across shifting terrain. Works such as Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image), Black Glass, Yaangna Plays Itself, The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon and Halpate form a constellation that refracts land, kinship, and vision through the residue of colonial image-making. Piron reveals how photography and film once attempted to fix Indigenous presence in place, while his own cinema dissolves those constraints — allowing sound to seep through ruptured surfaces, landscapes to remember, and ancestral traces to reassert themselves. In his hands, the archive becomes not a mausoleum but a generative field, where images regain their agency and where new ways of seeing can finally take root.
Still from Yaangna Plays Itself
Still from The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon
Still from Halpate
About the filmmaker
Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image. As a film programmer, he has served as a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Film Programming Team since 2013 and was also previously the Film Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and he has guest-curated film programs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF Lightbox, the Autry Museum of the American West, Metrograph, and various other film festivals and venues. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection's Current, MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope Magazine, the Metrograph Journal, and CNN.
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