Tiger
2025 · 13m · United States
Directed by Loren Waters
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Portrait of award-winning Muscogee Nation artist and elder Dana Tiger, her family, and the resurgence of the iconic Tiger T-shirt company.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about a Native artist and a T-shirt company sounds like the safest creative biography imaginable—and Waters somehow makes it work by refusing the expected triumphalist arc, letting contradictions breathe instead of resolving them.
Waters situates Tiger within the documentary tradition of familial portraiture and cultural preservation, where formal restraint and observational editing do the heavy lifting; the film moves with the assured pacing of someone who understands how to let craft recede into presence.
The singular choice here is Waters' decision to let the T-shirt itself become a character—not as symbol but as object moving through hands across generations—which reframes what could've been a straightforward family story into something about inheritance and continuity.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2025, Short Film Special Jury Award for Directing