Joey Clift is a Los Angeles-based comedian, an Emmy and Peabody Award nominated television writer and an enrolled Cowlitz Indian Tribal member. He’s having an Oklahoma premiere of his latest animated short film, Pow! at the Dead Center Film Festival on June 14th & 15th.

Growing up, Clift aspired to become a local TV weatherperson because he didn’t see Native American comedians on screen and thought a career in comedy was off-limits. He has since proven otherwise, with his comedy featured in The Washington Post, CNN, Dropout, Pitchfork, NPR, Dead Meat, and Comedy Central.
As a television writer Clift has written for shows such as the Emmy-nominated Spirit Rangers on Netflix, Molly of Denali and Alma’s Way on PBS, New Looney Tunes and Lego Ninjago: Decoded on Cartoon Network, and Paw Patrol on Nickelodeon. Joey Clift created, directed, and wrote Gone Native, a Webby Award-winning Comedy Central Digital series about weird microaggressions Native folks often experience, and his short films have screened everywhere from Just For Laughs to the Smithsonian Museum.

Clift’s latest short film is called Pow! and it's an 8 minute animated comedy about his experiences attending powwows as a young Native American kid and how loving video games and loving your culture don't have to be mutually exclusive.

You can see the Trailer here.

“Pow! is an idea that I had, I want to say about 3, maybe 4 years ago, and it's based on my person. I'm an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian tribe and I grew up in the reservation. It's based on my experiences of being dragged by my mom to powwows as a kid, truly being the kid who spent a lot more time sitting in the bleachers playing video games than dancing on the powwow floor,” said Clift.

I got to preview the short, and it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s both funny and heart-warming, while also being very visually appealing. It starts out pixilated, like an old school video game.

“As a Native dork of the 1990s, I grew up playing a lot of 16 bit Super Nintendo Role Playing Games. To represent Jake’s obsession with video games at the start of the short, I decided to animate the beginning of Pow! in the style of video game pixel art of that era, with the RPG classic “Earthbound” being the main visual touchstone,” said Clift.

Three distinct animation styles; ledger art, 16-bit pixel art and 2D animation are used throughout Pow! and each style is meant to represent the point of view of a particular character. There are also authentic documents and soundbites sourced from relevant organizations and events that add unique layers to the short.

“Animation is an expensive process, so it took a little while to get partners and support needed to make it. It was probably about 2 years of kind of feeling like, oh this is the thing that I really want to make. Fortunately, I developed a really great partnership with an organization called Pop Culture Collab, which gave me a really fantastic grant to cover a good chunk of the production. And then I am attached to an animation production company called FlickerLab that is a really great New York-based production company that has worked with Stephen Colbert and Michael Moore and a bunch of people. Once it felt like, OK, I have the pieces together and this is a thing that I can make, then from that process it was probably a year and a half or so that I started production on it in, in about January 2024, and then we finished it in February 2025,” said Clift.

The world premiere for Pow! took place at a festival in New Zealand earlier this year and has been screened at several places since then.

“Last week we screened in Seattle for Seattle International Film Festival, and we also got to do a screening on the reservation, which is in Washington State, the reservation I grew up on. It was just this really great experience to screen the short literally on the reservation that inspired the short. It was my first time in my entire career in the entertainment industry where I've been able to screen a project of mine in a place where my mom can come see it, so that was just a really great special experience. I just screened at a Brooklyn Film Festival in New York a few days ago, Phoenix Film Festival, Palm Springs, Cleveland, it's just making the rounds right now and I'm definitely getting a lot of frequent flyer miles flying out and supporting it,” said Clift.

While Pow! is a native story, Clift has been delighted to see how it has been received by the world at large.

“Something that is so cool about screening at so many different places is that this is a story that is very specifically native. It takes place at the powwow, a recurring character is a fried bread cook and no matter where I screen it, from a film festival in New Zealand where most of the audience probably has no idea what a powwow is, to native heavy audiences in Phoenix, to audiences of indie film fans in Cleveland or whatever, everybody laughs in the same spots, and then everybody reacts emotionally in the same spots. It is cool to see that even though this is so specifically a native story, the content is universal, native stories are universal and it just cool to see that native stories are for everybody. To see that literally in front of me through audience reactions, it's just really cool and validating to see,” said Clift.

Pow! of course will just be one of the many films being screened at the Dead Center Film Festival, running from June 11th-15th. You can find out more information about the festival at www.deadcenterfilm.org.

“I'm so excited to screen it in Oklahoma, a good chunk of the team is Oklahoma-based and I know that there's a really strong native community in Oklahoma, and I'm so excited to see how the Dead center audience responds to it.

I never saw contemporary, non-stereotypical Native people represented in the RPGs of my youth, and I thought seeing Jake and his family in that style would be something never before seen, and a form of cool Native representation in video games that I wish I had as a kid,” said Clift.

Clift hopes Pow! lands with audiences in a variety of ways.

“There are a few things that I hope that people take away from it. One, I hope people laugh a bunch, and I hope people get maybe a little bit of emotion out of it. Something that was really important to me about this project was to show that contemporary native stories in the animation space can exist alongside films like Pixar shorts, Looney Tunes shorts, and things like that. Growing up, the only native representation that I saw in kids' cartoons were like in the 1800s native stereotypes being shot at by Bugs Bunny in a cowboy hat. I wanted to create a contemporary native story that just showed that Native people exist and can be as funny as Bart Simpson. I would say that that was kind of the main thrust of what I was trying to do with it. One of my first jobs in Los Angeles, I wrote on a really great Looney Tunes relaunch called New Looney Tunes, and it was a really fun show that involved a lot of just really great physical comedy, and I was like, oh, I really want this kind of thing, but with native characters, and I feel really honored to get to do that,” said Clift.

Clift also has some advice for those who aspire to chase their creative aspirations, whatever they may be.

“I would say if you're a young person and you are interested in just expressing yourself creatively, I would say the most important advice is to do it. Don't just have ideas that you want to do, actually give them a shot. You never want to be that person that has spent 10 years of your life saying, hey, I really want to write a screenplay, or I have an idea for a song or a book. I try to operate my life with as few regrets as possible like that, you don't want to be somebody that has spent your entire life saying, oh, I really wish I tried to take up singing or something like that. I think that it's also important to just give yourself permission to suck. When you first start, you're probably not going to be great. The art that you're used to seeing is from people that have probably been doing it for 20-30 years, and if you're just starting out, you're probably just not gonna be as good as them, because you just don't have as many reps and you haven't done it for as long as they have. Give yourself permission to suck when you're starting, because you're just not gonna be perfect when you first start,” said Clift.

Make sure you go check out the Oklahoma premier of Pow! June 14-15th.

Joey Clift's Pow! Premiere at Oklahoma DeadCenter Film Festival