“When most people think about Native American culture, they think of The Last of the Mohicans,” says writer and director Sydney Freeland. “We typically see stereotypes like the wise elder, the angry brave, or the gentle maiden. I was trying to dig a little deeper than that, and to show how diverse life on the reservation actually is.”

Freeland is talking about her debut feature, Drunktown’s Finest, which opens in New York this weekend. The film pulls from her own experience growing up on a Navajo reservation, and as a transgender woman. But as specific as these circumstances may sound, the stories Freeland tells are relatable, about characters struggling to find their identity—ethically, spiritually, and sexually.

The film follows three young Native Americans living on a reservation in New Mexico. There’s Felixia, a promiscuous young trans girl who’s forced to fend off bullies as she strives to be a model; the bookish Nizhoni, whose adoptive white parents try to distance her from her Navajo background; and Sick Boy, a rebellious father-to-be preparing to join the army. The three narratives begin to intertwine as the characters struggle to reconcile where they came from with where they want to go.

What’s really beautiful about this film is its universality. It left me with the same heightened feeling of connectedness that I had after seeing Boyhood. One of the most touching elements, for me, was the loving relationship between Felixa and her extremely traditional Navajo family—the film subverts the cliched narrative of the LGBT youth at odds with his or her conservative parents. The characters aren’t predictable, nor can their problems be neatly solved. They are honest, raw, flawed, and a bit lost, but you root for them, in part because you can't help but see aspects of yourself reflected in their lives.

Freeland began working on Drunktown’s Finest at the Sundance Directors Lab, the highly selective workshop run by Robert Redford, who is now one of the film’s executive producers. “You’re flown to a resort in Utah for a month, where you shoot four scenes from your film that never see the light of day,” explains Freeland. “The idea is that you’re given a place to experiment, and to fail, which ultimately allows you to grow as a filmmaker.” Redford was drawn to Freeland’s story right away.“Sydney’s work is raw and original,” he says. “Being an advocate for Native American rights for many years, I felt this film showed a dark side of the Native American outcome, which needed to be told in order to promote understanding and healing.”

The film premiered at Sundance last year and has since won a number of awards, including Outfest's Grand Jury Award for U.S. Dramatic Feature Film and the HBO-sponsored Audience Award for First Feature. Its theatrical release comes at an auspicious moment, one that finds mainstream culture suddenly engaged by storytelling about transgender people both fictional and real. Freeland hopes her film will add to the cultural conversation about the trans experience. “I transitioned ten years ago,” she says. “When I was younger, I didn’t have a frame of reference for what I was going through, but things have changed so much. Even just in the past year we’ve had Laverne Cox on the cover of Time, **Jill Soloway’**s award-winning series Transparent, and in terms of exposure, those things are so empowering. If I could go back and tell myself ten years ago that in 2015 trans people would be part of popular culture, and have a platform to speak, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’”

Drunktown’s Finest opens in New York on Friday, February 20.