SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 REVIEW! Something not funny gets very funny as it is all laid out in the hilarious short The Great Cherokee Grandmother, written and directed by Cherokee filmmaker Anthony Sneed. John (John Henry Gloyne) and Carol (Phoebe Tyers) are on a first date at a restaurant. Carol asks John where he is from, and he answers that he is from North Carolina. When Carol presses further, John clarifies he is from the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina. Carol finds that very interesting because even though she appears white, she is a mutt mix of many different European lineages. However, when Carol starts going into a specific aspect of her heritage, John starts to feel a sinking feeling. His head starts to ring, and the room starts spinning. He grits his teeth and prepares for what he knows is coming. At that moment, Carol lets John know that she has always been told that she has a great-grandmother who is Cherokee. While this is a cause of grand celebration in the restaurant, John’s head is filled with whirling images of white actors wearing red faces and the “Indian princesses” that many white people have heard were in their families.
“…Carol lets John know that she has always been told that she has a great-grandmother who is Cherokee.”
First and foremost, The Great Cherokee Grandmother is a rib-cracking laugh-out-loud gut buster. Whatever your initial reaction is to the setup, the way Sneed keeps ramping up the lunacy will have all your sides splitting. Sneed unleashes this amazing trippy editing, with the laughs jumping out of each other in an endless cosmic swirl. The satiric hallucinations are peyote button pitch-perfect, with the overall effect of standing up in a sweat lodge. That it is all capped off with a PSA from the great Indigenous actor Wes Studi is wicked brilliant. That all this amusement can be squeezed out of such a subject really is remarkable, as Sneed also makes sure you understand the underlying gravity here. He is able to get across how nauseating this mixture of urban myth with cultural appropriation can be. So it really isn’t all tee-hees here, but The Great Cherokee Grandmother shows how a spoonful of mescaline helps the medicine go down—highly recommended as well as recommended while high.
The Great Cherokee Grandmother screened at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival.
"…Peyote button pitch-perfect… standing up in a sweat lodge."
