Barking Water at Sundance

Take the last ride home

Director hopes the Sundance crowd goes 'Barking' mad for his WewokaWewoka (which means "barking water" in the Muscogee language) goes Hollywood next week when Harjo's film has its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Thousands submit their films to the renowned annual festival; this is Harjo's third film to premiere there since 2005.

"I had wanted to make a film about an older couple, to explore that relationship and show that it is just as complicated as those of younger people," Harjo, 29, said. "It was sort of this idea that as we grow older, we realize we're the same people, but we just get more worn down, I guess. I didn't really know in what context that story would come about.

"I dropped it for a while. I didn't know where it was going, and I just felt very disconnected from it. But when my grandmother went to the hospital, it personalized things for me. I picked up the script again."

The result of three years of on-again, off-again writing is "Barking Water," a road movie involving an older, estranged couple with a stormy history. But now, Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman, an Oklahoma artist) is dying and looking to make amends with family members, and he'll need a favor from Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) to complete this task.

"This idea clicked," Harjo said, "of a hospital being like a prison for someone who wants to go home to die, and (my grandmother's experience) started forming this idea of someone breaking a person out of a hospital, so I merged that idea with my idea of an older couple with a tumultuous past."

The low-budget independent film was shot in less than three weeks in Ponca City, White Eagle, Pawhuska, Holdenville and Wewoka last March, using four actors with various degrees of training and "a lot of people I plucked from my life and put in my film," he said. Employing a "guerilla style" of filmmaking kept the process fresh and fast.

"It was a road movie for which I wanted to make the trip with the characters, so we shot it in sequence," Harjo said. "It was a style that was right for this film."Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.