Unless you seek out movies by Indigenous filmmakers, you’ve probably just seen Native Americans play secondary roles in Westerns. Rodrick Pocowatchit, the founder and director of Wichita’s AlterNative Film Festival, wants to change that. 

“I want to see more Native Americans represented in mass pop culture,” Pocowatchit said. “We are the least represented, but we have just as many vibrant stories to tell.”

Pocowatchit, who is Comanche, Pawnee, and Shawnee, is one of those storytellers. A former film columnist for the Wichita Eagle, he’s made four features and 22 short films, covering everything from the erasure of indigenous languages to a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. 

After years of experience as a director and attendee at film festivals, Pocowatchit founded AlterNative Film Festival — also known as ANFF — out of a desire to showcase broader Indigenous representation.

“I wanted to show Native American cinema, but also show it in a positive, different light,” Pocowatchit said.

With ANFF in its fourth year, Pocowatchit said he’s proud of the diverse narratives on offer. The festival, which runs next Friday through Sunday, boasts impassioned documentaries, irreverent comedies, and a special 15th-anniversary screening of Pocowatchit’s zombie film, “The Dead Can’t Dance.”

There are also receptions every day, where attendees can mingle with filmmakers and enjoy free refreshments. The festival’s opening reception will feature a performance by “The Voice” contestant — and Pocowatchit’s nephew — AJ Harvey.

ANFF is free to the public and takes place at Wichita’s Mid-America All-Indian Museum, which is located at the intersection of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, just northwest of the Keeper of the Plains.

The festival is bookended by nonfiction tales of reckoning. ANFF opens with “Sugarcane,” Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s 2024 Oscars contender about Canadian residential schools, and closes with “The Return of the Sacred Red Rock,” Jeremy Charles’ account of the return of a sacred relic to the Kaw people.

Eclectic fiction films round out ANFF’s feature offerings: “The Dead Can’t Dance” screens on Saturday afternoon, then that evening attendees can watch the dramedy “The Arrangement,” written and directed by Shonie De La Rosa. Sunday kicks off with “Angela’s Shadow,” Jules Koostachin’s supernatural thriller set in 1930s Canada.

“The Arrangement” takes place on the Navajo reservation — where De La Rosa lives and works — and is told almost entirely in the Diné, or Navajo, language. “Incident at Juniper Ridge,” a stunning film by Brandon Barber that shines in Saturday’s shorts program, is also in Diné with English subtitles.

If you’re wondering how a zombie film fits into this lineup, you need to see Pocowatchit’s take on the trope. “The Dead Can’t Dance” is a microbudget production that’s oh so 2010 — beware the scantily-clad zombie strippers — but its social commentary packs a punch.

In Pocowatchit’s apocalypse, Indigenous people are the only ones immune to the zombifying virus. (Shudder’s 2020 release “Blood Quantum” had the same conceit.) “The Dead Can’t Dance” is also brimming with real-world problems reflected in the festival’s other films. Dax (played by Pocowatchit) is trying to teach his nephew, Eddie (played by Powatchit’s real-life nephew, T.J. Williams), the Comanche language. When the protagonists are trapped at a school, they talk about how history is passed down to younger generations.

“I really wanted to confront how history was not taught right in schools,” Pocowatchit said. “I also wanted to talk about how Native people have been marginalized, and we've never really bounced back from that initial invasion, but somehow we persevered. We're still here.”

It certainly takes grit to be an independent filmmaker, particularly in the Midwest, but Pocowatchit happily makes do. When he decided to get into filmmaking, he briefly considered film school, but ultimately decided to take the do-it-yourself approach.

“I like to just dig in,” Pocowatchit explained. “I decided to write a screenplay, so I did some studying, did some workshops, and I wrote a script.”

That script, called “Dancing on the Moon,” got Pocowatchit into the Screenwriters Lab at the Sundance Film Festival. It would eventually become his first film, released in 2003.

Pocowatchit, who has a theater background, prefers working with non-actors, and he often sources friends and family for his films, which he makes locally in Wichita. The third protagonist in “The Dead Can’t Dance,” Ray, is played by Pocowatchit’s younger brother, Guy Ray Pocowatchit. The brothers have starred together in three of Pocowatchit’s four features, including “Dancing on the Moon.”

To hear Guy Ray Pocowatchit tell it, his big-screen debut was no accident. “Mom made me do it,” he said, laughing.

Mom knows best — he picked up an award for his performance. After that, he happily agreed to star in more of his brother’s films.

“He's a very talented, imaginative person,” Guy Ray Pocowatchit said of his older brother. “So I'm glad he has this as a good outlet for him to showcase his talent.”

Rodrick Pocowatchit, who said one of the earliest films to inspire him was John Hough’s “Escape to Witch Mountain,” because he could relate to the aliens, has built his own representation from the ground up. But while making a movie can be incredibly difficult, getting it seen is even harder — especially now, as every filmmaker fights to win eyeballs away from social media and curated streaming platforms make it increasingly difficult for indies to break through.

“One of my goals is to get more Native representation of stories that Native people want to tell in their own way,” Rodrick Pocowatchit said. “So I feel like it's an honor that I get to be another venue for these films to be seen.”

The Details

AlterNative Film Festival
November 7-9, 2025 at the Mid-America All-Indian Museum, 650 N. Seneca St. in Wichita

The festival kicks off Friday, Nov. 7 with a 6 p.m. opening reception and 7 p.m. screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Sugarcane” and runs through Sunday. See the ANFF website for a detailed schedule.

The 15th anniversary screening of “The Dead Can’t Dance” takes place Saturday at 4:15 p.m., followed by a Q&A with Pocowatchit.

All ANFF events take place at the Mid-America All-Indian Museum and are free and open to the public.

This post was updated on October 30: Rodrick Pocowatchit has made 22 short films, not 12. More on our commitment to sharing accurate information.

Lena Wilson is a journalist who lives in Brooklyn with her wife and their two senior rescue dogs, Neil and Knives.

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