Skins (film)

Skins is a 2002 feature film by Chris Eyre and based upon the novel of the same name by Adrian C. Louis. The film is set on the fictional Beaver Creek Indian Reservation in South Dakota near the Nebraska border, a place very much like the actual Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the setting in the book and the place where the film was actually shot. Lakota Sioux tribal police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig) struggles to rescue his older, alcoholic brother, Mogie (Graham Greene), a former football star who was wounded in combat three times in Vietnam. Winona LaDuke makes a cameo appearance as Rose Two Buffalo.

Plot

Rudy and Mogie Yellow Lodge are Lakota Sioux brothers on the Beaver Creek Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Mogie, unemployed and with a teenage son. Rudy, a police officer, struggles to care for his brother, nephew and the rest of the town through the hands of law. Mogie resists Rudy's attempts, preferring to drink and joke about the depressed state of their people and town. As a child, Rudy had been bitten by a spider, and Mogie told him it was Iktomi, the trickster spider; this spider re-appears to Rudy early in the film and Rudy's attempts to help begin to wander outside the lines of the law.