Delivery From Earth

Lockheed Martin paid for a Navajo Mars birth.

The first human born on another planet happens off camera. What you actually watch is a Gallup playground. A Navajo boy wants a working television so he can see the Martian. His grandfather sells a book to make that happen. Runtime is six minutes. Michael Becker wrote it, directed it, latestnetflix.com maintains, and produced it in New Mexico under Filmtribe Moving Pictures. TMDB dates the U.S. Release to 15 February 2014.,

The story worth printing is the check that funded it, the producer who spent decades putting Native crews behind cameras, and a playground cast that later walked into much larger rooms.

Phil Bluehouse plays Shicheii, the grandfather. Casey Draper is Aditsan, the kid. In the short, the old man is not buying today. He is selling. Letterboxd watchers clock the book as an autographed copy of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Filmtribe's own YouTube upload tags Sagan, NASA, Orion, and Gallup in the same line, so the reading is not a stretch. On the broadcast, Tailinh Agoyo's astronaut mother thanks her hometown and says the baby is no different from anyone on Earth. The line that sticks is the one the family already knew. "We are all one child, spinning through Mother Sky.",,

A grant with a contractor's logo.

Labocine and the Filmtribe description both say the short won the Lockheed Martin / New Mexico Film Foundation filmmaker grant. Lockheed builds missiles and the Orion spacecraft. The film it bankrolled is a Navajo family watching a Mars birth from a playground in Gallup. Becker produced with George Burdeau, the Blackfeet filmmaker who taught, mentored Native crews, and directed the American Indian Film Institute in Santa Fe. Co-producers were Michael Norman, Laurie Merrill, and Carl Vigil. Yon Thomas shot it. Canton Becker scored it. Languages are English and Navajo.,,

Festival programmers later slotted it next to Nanobah Becker's The 6th World, the other Navajo Mars film, on indigenous-futurist bills that also ran Afronauts, Wakening, and Robots of Brixton. The NWT premiere credit on those programs is a reminder that this six-minute object traveled farther than its YouTube view count.

The playground grew up.

MorningStar Angeline, Navajo, plays Doli. Same year she was in Sydney Freeland's Drunktown's Finest, another Gallup story that went to Sundance. She later turned up on Westworld, Yellowstone, Marvel's Echo, and HBO's IT: Welcome to Derry. Ryan Begay, also Navajo, plays Naalyehe. He already had a Breaking Bad credit as a Good Samaritan, then kept working in New Mexico features and Dark Winds. Paul Geoffrey, the news anchor from John Boorman's Excalibur, reads the birth as if it were Apollo. Filmtribe posted the whole short to YouTube in April 2015. It still sits there, six minutes and change. A contractor's grant and a grandfather's book buying a boy a window onto Mars.,,