‘As the Osage told me, it’s about greed’

THE 76TH CANNES FILM FESTIVAL PRESENTS THE WORLD PREMIERE OF MARTIN SCORSESE’S KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON AND WELCOMES THE CAST AND DIRECTOR ON THE RED CARPET, MAY 20. THE EVENT MARKS THE FIRST TIME SCORSESE HAS BEEN IN OFFICIAL SELECTION SINCE THE PRESENTATION OF AFTER HOURS BACK IN 1986. JULIAN NEWBY REPORTS

THE CANNES Film Festival welcomes to the Croisette members of the cast of Killers of the Flower Moon, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Tantoo Cardinal as well as the film’s director Martin Scorsese and members of the production team.

The film is screened on Saturday, May 20 in the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

Based on David Grann’s best-selling book and adapted for the screen by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in 1920s Oklahoma and tells of the serial killings of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror — and the FBI investigation that followed.

Scorsese says the film is an exploration of “the nature of a whole way of thinking as being complicit in genocide. It’s dehumanising people. Ultimately, as the Osage told me, it’s about greed.”

The film is adapted from journalist

David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. It’s the account of a five-year period in the 1920s during which 20 indigenous Americans, all of the Osage tribe, were murdered for their cash-rich oil shares. There was prejudice against this group of people — considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world at the time — with the press referring to them as “the red millionaires” living in “terracotta mansions” and other such racist-tinged epithets.

It's ironic that their plight was not born of poverty — as with so many Native Americans — but of riches, because underneath their reservation was an ocean of oil. This wealth made the Osage attractive targets for murderous con men who sometimes even married their victims, took their money and then their lives.

Grann's bestselling book reads like a murder mystery as J Edgar Hoover's FBI takes on its first murder investigation — and also takes a dark journey into the racism that enabled white people to view Native Americans both as sub-humans and people undeserving of such fabulous wealth.