Loren Waters’ ‘Tiger’ is an act of remembrance – a docu-drama focused on legacy. At its heart is Dana Tiger, daughter of the revered Muscogee Creek artist Jerome Tiger, whose brief but powerful artistic life shaped a family’s destiny. Told in Dana’s own voice, her narration weaves a poetic thread through grief, memory, and survival.
This isn’t biography as usual, it’s a cinematic ritual – part documentary, part dramatized reconstruction, with flickers of home video. Waters crafts a visual homage that pulses with sincerity. Robert Hunter’s cinematography glows with reverence, wrapping each frame in quiet dignity. Reconstruction scenes bleed into the fabric of the film, conjuring the Tiger family’s past like sacred visions – never theatrical, always deeply felt.
At the core lies the Tiger T-shirt company, a family-run venture that silk-screened Indigenous art for the world. But Tiger doesn’t romanticize; it bears witness. Dana speaks of her brother Chris’s brutal murder and her sister Lisa’s illness with a voice both steady and shattered. Yet through every collapse, art remains. It is protest. It is prayer.
Waters refuses to let this be a eulogy. Instead, ‘Tiger’ becomes a generational echo. Dana’s son now silk-screens the very designs his uncle once did – his hands bridging time, loss, and culture. The Tiger family, fractured by tragedy, binds itself not by forgetting, but by creating.
This is essentially a tribute, but also a quiet rebellion: against erasure, against death, against despair. A legacy tattooed in ink and love.
