Bisbee '17
Remarkable [and] continually surprising...the issues raised remain as urgent and upsetting in the present as they were 100 years ago.
Bisbee '17
BISBEE ’17 is a nonfiction feature film by award-winning filmmaker Robert Greene set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border.
Radically combining collaborative documentary, western and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly two-thousand immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, shipped to the middle of the New Mexican desert and left there to die. This long-buried and largely forgotten event came to be known as the Bisbee Deportation.
The film documents locals as they play characters and stage dramatic scenes from the controversial story, culminating in a largescale recreation of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and offer conflicting views of the event, underscoring the difficulty of collective memory, while confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.
"Unlike perhaps any documentary you’ve seen recently...remarkable...opens an eerie, liminal space between reality and its representation, in which minds as curious as his own are free to wander...continually surprising...the issues raised remain as urgent and upsetting in the present as they were 100 years ago." (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)
Radically combining collaborative documentary, western and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly two-thousand immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, shipped to the middle of the New Mexican desert and left there to die. This long-buried and largely forgotten event came to be known as the Bisbee Deportation.
The film documents locals as they play characters and stage dramatic scenes from the controversial story, culminating in a largescale recreation of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and offer conflicting views of the event, underscoring the difficulty of collective memory, while confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.
"Unlike perhaps any documentary you’ve seen recently...remarkable...opens an eerie, liminal space between reality and its representation, in which minds as curious as his own are free to wander...continually surprising...the issues raised remain as urgent and upsetting in the present as they were 100 years ago." (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)
Genre
Documentary,
Western,
Politics & World Affairs,
History
Runtime
112
Language
English,
Spanish
Director
Robert Greene
Awards:
Nominee, Grand Jury Prize ~ Documentary, Sundance Film Festival
FEATURED REVIEW
A.O. Scott, New York Times
Bisbee, Ariz., not far from the Mexican border, is a quiet former mining town, one of many such places scattered across the American West. Tombstone, site of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and a popular tourist destination, is just up the road. Bisbee has a notably violent episode in its past as ...
Played at
Monica Film Center 9.28.18 - 10.04.18
Playhouse 7 9.28.18 - 10.04.18
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