Director
Robert Greene
Development support
Production support
Film Details
Runtime: 112 minutes
Format: Short film
Doc Society Involvement
Docsoc helped with Development
Docsoc helped with Production
BISBEE ’17 is a nonfiction feature film by Sundance award winning director Robert Greene set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border. The story follows several members of the close knit community as they prepare to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation, where 1200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes by a deputized force, banished to the middle of the desert and left to die.
Subjects
Society
Awards & Festivals
Awards
Festival Screenings
Reviews
Bisbee '17 speaks to the stakes of local history and amateur genealogy for places and people that are twinkling out of living memory.
A fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.
The film's epic canvas fuses a procedural documentary with tableaux that wouldn't be out of place in a horror western.
With more intimate documentaries like Kate Plays Christine and Kati With an I, director Robert Greene has always found space for enigma in motivation, in a lack of resolution: Bisbee '17 cannot afford such space.
It would be enough for any documentary to tell this piece of hushed-up history, but Bisbee '17 is onto something more radical; watching it is like witnessing the defusing of a time bomb from a foot away.
Greene has made a hard movie to argue with, even as he invites you to do exactly that.
Greene's movie... grows into an adventurous exercise in drama-documentary; what could have seemed arch or awkward is handled with grace and tact, and there is even a song.
Fresh score.
The sheer audacity and originality of the exercise makes it a must-see, regardless of what you might think of the success or failure of any particular choice.
Even though "Bisbee '17" depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film.
The film is rich and multifaceted, as Greene employs an array of styles (historical reenactments, direct cinema-style portraiture, musical numbers) to investigate the complex relationship between Bisbee's past and present.
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