By Any Means Necessary: Kali Reis on Catch the Fair One

In “Catch the Fair One,” Native boxing champ Kali Reis delivers a powerhouse performance just as hard-hitting as you’d expect from a career athlete whose nickname is K.O., as in knockout.  At the center of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s absorbing vigilante thriller, out this week in select theaters and on digital platforms/VOD, Reis plays a boxer who infiltrates a human trafficking operation in order to track down and punish those responsible for her sister’s disappearance. Reis—who is half-Native and half-Cape Verdean, descending from Cherokee, Nipmuc and Seaconke Wampanoag tribes—collaborated with Wladyka on the script, which was informed by her advocacy on behalf of Indigenous peoples’ rights.  Highlighting the on-going epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), “Catch the Fair One” examines the fallout of one girl’s abduction on Reis’ fighter, Kaylee “K.O.” Uppashaw. Mired in pain, regret, and loss since teenage Weeta (Mainaku Borrero) vanished off the street, Kaylee hasn’t been in the ring for some time, but she’s still training: sparring with much larger men, sleeping at the local women’s shelter with a razor blade in her mouth.  The authorities have proved predictably useless, and so Kaylee decides to trace her sister’s footsteps herself, breaching the local criminal underworld then working her way up its chain of command with ferocious purpose. As “Catch the Fair One” plunges Kaylee into the fight of her life, Wladyka’s suspenseful direction holds the audience close to the ensuing carnage—and depicts its body count with ice-cold clarity.  Making her acting debut, Reis supplies the kind of core magnetism such a tough, tense thriller demands; she’s nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, with this year’s winners set to be announced in early March. “Catch the Fair One” first premiered at Tribeca and has enjoyed a successful festival run since, including a screening at the Chicago Critics Film Festival last fall. With the film finally out more widely this week, the Providence-born fighter sat for an interview about acting, activism, and the dark reality of a national crisis. How did this project first take shape for you? This has been almost a five-year process. Josef originally reached out to me via Instagram; he slid into my DMs. He was already an established director, from “The Walking Dead” and “Narcos,” he already had a feature film out, [2014’s “Manos Sucias,”] and he introduced himself. I was established as a professional fighter. He told me who he was and said, “I have this script. Are you interested in acting?”  I had always been interested in acting but didn't know where to start. Josef reached out to me, and he eventually came up to Rhode Island; we just sat down and talked. He’d had an idea of the story, as he was finding out about [the crisis of] missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), of which the general population has no clue. He ran across my profile through a mutual friend that owns a boxing gym in New York, and he was drawn to the fact that I do my best to bring awareness to various Native problems, such as MMIW. I read the script, and we just started from there.  He asked me to jump on as a collaborative, creative partner. He got to know me and sat down with some elders of my tribe. We just started sharing ideas back and forth about the characters, building the story, and what themes that we wanted to come across. From the beginning, his approach was that he knew it wasn't really his story to tell and wanted to tell it the right way. It's such a sensitive subject, not just to Indigenous women but to Indigenous people in general. Sex trafficking in the community—and in general, non-Indigenous—is a huge problem, and it has been for a long time, but it especially is [a crisis] for Indigenous women.  We didn't want to sexualize it or put what was happening [to victims] on screen in an obvious way. We wanted more to suggest, as we already know what’s going on and what this is about. Josef was very sensitive about that; that’s how he is, because he's very cautious and he wants to tell things right. We wanted to drop the audience in the middle of this world, tell the story, and rip them out as fast as we could. It was more or less “suggest but don't show.” We were also teeter-tottering around, “Is it too dark, or is it not dark enough?” And every time we circled back around on that, I had to remind them, "Listen: this isn't dark enough, but we'll stay balanced on this line to get the point across." This film tells a fictional story, but it's very real to a lot of different families. It could have gone darker. “Catch the Fair One” is so impactful in part because of how it’s filmed: close-up and personal, claustrophobically so. Tell me about acting in scenes and how that shooting style influenced your performance. Early on, we understood that Kaylee was going to carry this entire journey on her back, so the audience could see her perspective. We wanted the audience close to he