ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

CHRIS EYRE (Director)
Chris was born in Portland, Oregon to a Native American mother, and then given up for adoption. Raised by Caucasian parents, Eyre eventually reconnected with his biological mother and the rest of his extended Native family, who live throughout the American West.

Intrigued by visual storytelling from an early age, Eyre majored in Media at the University of Arizona, where he directed his first 16mm shorts, then went on to receive his Master's from the NYU Film School. While there, he wrote and directed several short films, including the Indian drama "Tenacity. " Released by Forefront Films, it won NYU's Best Short Film, the coveted Mobile Award, and a place at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival.

That same year, Eyre was invited to the Sundance Directing Workshop to work under the tutelage of Robert Redford and Steve Zaillian on a short screen adaptation of Sherman Alexie's screenplay Someone Kept Saying Pow Wow. The following year, Eyre shot a feature length version of the film (retitled Smoke Signals) in just 23 days with a predominantly Native American cast. After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, where it garnered both the coveted Audience Award and the Filmmaker's Trophy for Eyre, Smoke Signals was released to critical acclaim by Miramax, going on to gross over $6. 5 million.

A Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film Fellow, Eyre also has been the recipient of the Gotham Awards Open Palm Award, the Tokyo International Film Festival's Artistic Contribution Award, the Haig Manoogain, the Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese Post-Production Awards, and the 1995 Sundance Cinema 100 Award. Currently Eyre is developing a screen adaptation of Peter Matthiessen's best-selling book The Spirit of Crazy Horse, about American Indian activist Leonard Peltier with producer Jon Kilik.

JON KILIK (Producer)
Jon is one of today's most notable producers, collaborating with a wide range of auteur filmmakers to create a body of work emphasizing human values and social issues.

In 1988 he began his partnership with Spike Lee on Lee's classic examination of racism in America, Do the Right Thing, which garnered two Oscar nominations and a place in The National Archives. Kilik has gone on to produce ten of Lee's films, including Malcolm X, Clockers and most recently, Bamboozled.

In 1995 Kilik produced Tim Robbins' Academy Award-winning Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, and went on to produce Robbins' most recent directorial endeavor, the critically acclaimed Cradle Will Rock. In 1997 he produced Gary Ross' luminous Pleasantville, which landed on many critics' "Ten Best" lists.

Among Kilik's additional credits are Robert DeNiro's highly lauded directorial debut A Bronx Tale and Robert Altman's Ready-To-Wear, both of artist Julian Schnabel's films: Basquiat and the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Before Night Falls, as well as Ed Harris's Oscar®-Winner, Pollock.

ADRIAN LOUIS (Author, Skins)
Adrian is a novelist, poet and former managing editor of The Lakota Times, the largest American Indian newspaper in the country. A Lovelock Paiute Indian, he has taught English at the Oglala Lakota College on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation since 1984. His many books of poetry include Among the Dog Eaters, Ceremonies of the Damned and Fire Water World, which was honored as the Best Book of Poems in 1989 by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Louis has received fellowships from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the South Dakota Arts Council, The Bush Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.