Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Chloé Zhao’s melancholic family drama follows two siblings preparing to live apart when older brother Johnny decides to follow his girlfriend to the West Coast.

Johnny Winters is at a turning point. Growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he helps support his mother and eleven-year-old sister Jashaun by illegally selling bootleg alcohol, to the ire of other bootleggers. His graduation is fast approaching, and after his girlfriend is accepted into a Los Angeles college, they plan for him to follow her there. Keeping it a secret for now, Johnny asks his incarcerated brother for advice: he should go, absolutely. But when his eleven-year-old sister, Jashaun, overhears the plan, she is left quietly devastated.

Curator’s note
For her feature film debut, Chloé Zhao tells the poignant story of childhood ending, people changing and the pillars of sibling love shifting forever. Change, in The Songs My Brothers Taught Me, isn’t exciting; it’s imbued with quiet melancholy and a loss that feels unlikely to ever be pedalled back. Carrying the weight of this emotional burden are two moving performances by newcomers John Reddy and Jashaun St John, who are joined by a mostly non-professional cast, each delivering authentic performance and storytelling along the way.

Filmed on a remarkably small budget with a small crew, Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a marvel of independent filmmaking, with many of the crew going on to great success. Cinematographer Joshua James Richards has collaborated with Zhao on all her films through to Eternals, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Nomadland. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to high acclaim.