Jessica Chastain stars in the true story of Catherine Weldon, a 19th-century Brooklyn artist who travelled to the Dakota Territory and became the confidante of legendary Sioux chief Sitting Bull.
Featuring spellbinding performances from Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain and Canadian Plains Cree actor Michael Greyeyes, this sweeping historical drama transports us back to the 19th-century American frontier. Woman Walks Ahead explores a pivotal yet little-known encounter between a pioneering European artist and an Indigenous icon.
A strong-willed nonconformist, Swissborn, New York–bred Catherine Weldon (Chastain) lived life on her own terms. She was a passionate painter, and by the 1880s had become committed to the cause of Native Americans. Woman Walks Ahead chronicles Weldon's journey to Dakota to paint Hunkpapa Lakota holy man Sitting Bull (Greyeyes). Far more than a mere portrait session, the meeting inspires a conversation that will change both artist and subject.
Weldon became Sitting Bull's secretary, interpreter, and advocate, but not before these two powerful people would contend with their differences in assumptions, in outlook, and in the long reach of their respective histories.
Directed by Susanna White (Our Kind of Traitor) and written by Steven Knight — the Oscar-nominated writer of Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises and the director of Locke — Woman Walks Ahead is an essential alternative take on change in the Old West, one centring on a heroic woman and a great leader who refused to fade quietly into history.