The Rocket Boy

The scouts

A Diné kid building a rocket to resurrect his dead father should be weirder than this—it's got the subversive bones of something genuinely strange, but Seschillie plays it too safe, letting whimsy smooth over the grief's actual jagged edges.

The film sits comfortably in the lineage of magical-realist coming-of-age shorts, with a visual palette that recalls both Indigenous visual traditions and contemporary indie sensibility, though it doesn't quite break new formal ground within that space.

The decision to frame the rocket not as miraculous but as a child's functional, almost mundane object—weathered scraps held together with intention—is what transforms this from grief narrative into something that actually breathes; Seschillie trusts the material reality to do the emotional work.