[Update: These images have been removed at the request of the PR company]

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival has its fair share of terrific-looking films, and among them is Wind River. The directorial debut of Sicario and Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen as a veteran game tracker and FBI agent, respectively, who investigate a murder that occurred on a Native American reservation.

It will be interesting to see what the word on the film is out of Sundance because Sheridan is having himself quite a year. Hell or High Water has a serious shot at earning a Best Original Screenplay nomination and Sicario was straight-up snubbed for a nomination last year. With just those two screenplays, Sheridan has shown himself to be surprisingly adept at coming up with riveting crime yarns that take a broader view of social impacts couched within an investigative framework. So will Wind River look at our relationship with Native American people, or is Sheridan going for something else with his new movie? I’m eager to find out.

Additionally, Wind River will close out a trilogy on the American frontier for Sheridan with Sicario and Hell or High Water being the first two parts.  Here's what he told us when we interviewed him earlier this year for Hell or High Water:

Well then… what do you see as the thematic tie between all three films?

 

There are ties about purpose and forging morality. Facing your morality and deciding what it is. Assimilation — people living in places they probably shouldn’t, where historically they didn’t or moved out at a certain time. The Shoshone and the Arapaho and the Cheyenne and any number of different Indian nations lived in that Wind River area and they left it when eight feet of snow fell and moved somewhere else. But they don’t have that option today, so that’s something that’s explored. How does one endure in a place they shouldn’t be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities. So it’s not exclusive to these remote regions. In these remote regions, where there are less people, the consequences are more acute… so it’s a little easier to point the microscope.

Check out the first images from Wind River below. The 2017 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19 – 29th.