When centering big-budget films on historical events, directors typically take one of three approaches. Directors either tell the event’s story by using it as the movie’s central backdrop, like the Million Man March in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus; or they take the biopic route by focusing on a central figure, like Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar Grant in Fruitvale Station; or they lens it like a straightforward history lesson, as in Ava DuVernay’s Selma.

In the period-piece drama Sarah’s Oil (executive produced by Ciara and Russell Wilson), filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh gives us the history lesson method: Sarah Rector (actress Naya Desir-Johnson), an 11-year-old Black grandchild of Creek Indians in the early 1900s, receives a parcel of oil-rich land in Oklahoma under the Treaty of 1866, and fights a

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