Grown-ups’ faces are mostly left off-screen in ‘Jazzy.’ ‘We were really focused on the kids,’ the director says.

Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux never expected to see herself grow up on-screen, much less as thestar in a movie that so closely resembled her life.

The 13-year-old Oglala Lakota actress leads the film Jazzy, now in theaters and available on demand, about a young Native American girl who lives in a small town outside her reservation in South Dakota. In the movie, directed and co-written by Morrisa Maltz, she navigates the joy and heartbreak of middle school friendship, especially with her fellow Lakota friend Syriah (played by Syriah Fool Head Means).

“I wasn’t expecting to be the one who gets an acting role, especially as a main acting role, and it just made me feel really happy,” Shangreaux told Yahoo Entertainment. She said making the film was a “fun experience” and something “I can be proud of.”

Shangreaux first appeared in Maltz’s 2022 film The Unknown Country, which starred Lily Gladstone and explored Native American life on and off the reservation. Both films are based on real-life stories told to Maltz by Shangreaux’s mother, Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, a close friend of Maltz and a co-writer on the films. (Lainey and her husband, Devin, even got married onscreen during The Unknown Country, and Jasmine is Maltz’s goddaughter.)

For Maltz, who is not Native, telling these stories in collaboration with the Shangreaux family allowed her to show something “we can all relate to” — “growing up away from the family or the communities that our parents and our grandparents” were raised in.

“My grandma was raised in a very small Jewish community in Baltimore, and everyone knew each other until they were 103, and that has kind of died away in a lot of ways,” she told Yahoo Entertainment, explaining that she moved to South Dakota for her husband’s job as a paleontologist. There, she met Lainey, and the two became fast friends.

“Being raised in a small town a few hours from the rez is different from being raised in your community where everybody is the same” and shares your culture, Maltz said.

Following up The Unknown Country with Jazzy wasn’t something that the writer-director had planned, but Jasmine and the stories she and her mother wanted to tell inspired Maltz.

“We were finishing The Unknown Country” and started making Jazzy at the same time, Maltz explained. “We already had so much footage of Jazzy, and we all fell in love with Jazzy so much.”

Working with her mom and her friend Syriah, Jasmine said she “felt really nice [shooting the movie], because I’m not talking to a stranger. I’m talking to somebody I knew while growing up, and I know what makes them happy, and I know their comforts and stuff.”

The children in the film, a mix of Native and non-Native kids, take center stage, to the point where the grown-ups’ faces aren’t even shown for much of it.

Maltz said that happened organically alongside her cinematographer, Andrew Hajek, who also has a writing credit on the film.

“We were really focused on the kids and what was going on with them, and suddenly we realized we were just shooting the kids, suddenly realized we have not been shooting any adults.”

She said that’s what differentiated her film from something like Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood, another coming-of-age film, which followed a boy’s life from age 6 to 18. Linklater filmed the same young actor (Ellar Coltrane) over a period from 2002-2013.

“It definitely was the film we were talking about when we started making Jazzy,” she said, of Boyhood. “A lot of coming-of-age movies end up being about the parents even if they’re about the kids, and that is definitely something we wanted to avoid.”

Gladstone returns for Jazzy, where she serves as an actress and executive producer.

“I really enjoyed working with her,” Jasmine said. “Despite her being famous and stuff — because I don’t care about popularity because I care about personality mostly — she was really nice and I felt like she was the one that inspired me to be an actor.”

Maltz said the star of Killers of the Flower Moon was instrumental in both mentoring Jasmine and in bringing more attention to the independent film, which had a budget under $300,000.

“We’re incredibly grateful for her taking the film under her wing,” she said of Gladstone. “It just helps people see it and helps them be interested” in it.

As for making a follow-up film tracking Jasmine as she moves into high school or beyond, Maltz hesitated, saying that she and Gladstone are currently working on other projects and are not actively planning to add another related film to her slate, since the first two happened “so organically.”

“I know people want to see Jazzy and Syriah growing up. I can already feel that,” she said. But “it has to be right.”

Jazzy is in select theaters and on demand now.