Written by: Chloé Zhao
Starring: John Reddy, Jashaun St. John, Travis Lone Hill, Taysha Fuller, Irene Bedard, Allen Reddy
Rating: [3.5/5]
Life on an Indigenous reservation presents many struggles for youngsters seeking to strike out on their own and make a living. This comes from the difficulty of attaining gainful employment on the outside, where the inside does not present much better prospects. It allows this itching to chip away at these characters as they seek to find their purpose. Songs My Brothers Taught Me expertly explores this despair through a beautiful and melancholic brother-sister relationship.
Living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Jashaun (Jashaun St. John) and John (Johnny Winters) struggle in trying to help their mother make ends meet. John tries by helping sell illicit alcohol to individuals on the reservation with dreams of one day leaving the reservation and moving to Los Angeles with his girlfriend.
Much has been documented regarding the struggles of indigenous individuals in these reservations where they certainly carry positives as a form of reparation but also contain plenty of issues for the people living in it. However, issues like loneliness persist for these individuals as they try to aspire to achieve something in their lives where John firmly sits in this story. Staying on the reservation keeps the status quo for him and judging by the fate of his older brother, it means if he continues on the same trajectory he will find himself in the same prison cell. This desperation informs everything he does and what he seeks to achieve, which serves as the opposite for Jashaun as she goes through her own struggles.
Younger than her brother and still carrying some sense of idealism within her, Jashaun seeks to understand her brother’s struggles. She wanders around the reservation going through different experiences, which informs how she views life on it as opposed to her brother and the desperation that comes with it. Jashaun brings this specific perspective to the story, especially in the way she views this more idealistic life, as opposed to the brutal reality John sees as he reaches a certain age creating a disconnect.
Navigating through these experiences, we see these two individuals in front of a gorgeous landscape immaculately captured by cinematographer Joshua James Richards, which marks his first collaboration with Chloé Zhao. They capture the natural landscape of this reservation by displaying the beauty it inhabits. They allow these large areas to almost swallow up these characters showing them as a small part of a larger piece of land and community. Using the natural light of the sun to highlight everything becomes a trademark for Joshua James Richards with his approach to these stories making for something quite remarkable.
Utilizing untrained actors for these roles Jashaun St. John and John Reddy do a good job in bringing forth the emotion of this story and how much these moments mean to each of them. Being able to draw from their own experiences certainly helps in making this such a realistic story making such a rich experience overall in the narrative.
Existing as her first feature film, Chloé Zhao begins her journey by focusing on and highlighting individuals on the fringes of society. Those who get forgotten by the larger populace and Indigenous folks living on reservations certainly fit this mold. As she proves in her later films, she allows everything to have a genuine presentation as well as demonstrates a level of care in displaying the particular struggles of these individuals and the community as a whole. Her insistence in utilizing these non-actors certainly takes such a unique approach, which has certainly turned into her calling card amongst the many things she does exceptionally well.
Emotionally potent and admirable as a feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me takes us into an Indigenous reservation and not to display what happens to these individuals in an exploitative or gratuitous manner but rather with the care to document the reality of this circumstance. The film captures the dreams and hopes of someone coming of age like John as well as the youthful innocence of Jashaun as she tries to process everything occurring with her family and brother during this transitory phase. A mix of love and melancholy ruminates throughout the feature to accentuate the circumstances John and Jashaun endure and where they go from here at this point in their lives.
Films with Josh 
