When a teen goes missing from the Cahuilla Reservation, her sister searches for the truth, navigating her family's grief and ancestral visions that draw her into a cosmic world that may hold the answers, if she chooses to listen.
An interweaving of the ancient, contemporary, and futuristic, MENIL AND HER HEART is a genre-bending family drama that oscillates between present-day life on the Cahuilla Reservation in Southern California and a parallel universe grounded in Cahuilla cosmology and story. The screenplay follows two Cahuilla sisters, Menil and Nesune. When Menil, an aspiring singer/songwriter, begs Nesune to accompany her to a vocal competition to compete for a cash prize, Nesune finds it impossible to say no. However, a fight between the sisters leads to their separation and Menil’s disappearance.
When the family’s devastation is met with indifference by local law enforcement, Nesune knows it is up to her to find Menil and bring her home. Letters of secret correspondence between Menil and their late father lead Nesune back to the Cahuilla Reservation, where she convinces her grandfather to help her investigate. On the Cahuilla Reservation, Nesune begins getting visions, which manifest as migraines. She self-medicates to block the strange images and the man, Dreamwalker, who often accompanies them. With her grandfather’s encouragement, she finally listens to Dreamwalker, who guides her to a hot spring where she enters another dimension through the water. Here, the Cahuilla stories buried in Nesune’s memory are real, and she must choose between staying amongst the stars with her sister or returning home to fight for the other missing women in her community.
Isabella Dionne Madrigal (Cahuilla/Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is a writer/director/actor and Harvard alum. She is a 2025 Sundance Native Lab Fellow, the Co-Director of the Luke Madrigal Indigenous Storytelling Nonprofit, a winner of the Yale Young Native Playwrights Contest, and a 2025 Native Theatre Project Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Awareness Awardee. As an actor, she is best known for her roles in Menil and Her Heart and Echo (Marvel). Isabella has been the recipient of the Center for Native American Youth’s Champion for Change Award, the California Arts Council Impact Grant, the Native American Media Alliance Features Lab, and the First Peoples Fund’s Native Performing Arts Fellowship. Her work often centers ancestral wisdom, healing, and Indigenous futurisms.
Sundance Native Lab 2025 - Lab Selection
Sundance Graton Fellowship 2026 - Project Selection
