Bisbee '17
Feature length film Completed 2018
Director
Robert Greene
Doc Society helped with
Development
Production
Runtime: 112 minutes
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.
Crew
Bisbee '17 speaks to the stakes of local history and amateur genealogy for places and people that are twinkling out of living memory.
Film Comment Magazine
Oct. 30, 2018
The film's epic canvas fuses a procedural documentary with tableaux that wouldn't be out of place in a horror western.
Slant Magazine
Sept. 5, 2018
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.
Austin Chronicle
Oct. 5, 2018
Greene has made a hard movie to argue with, even as he invites you to do exactly that.
Los Angeles Times
Sept. 25, 2018
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.
RogerEbert.com
Sept. 5, 2018
Even though "Bisbee '17" depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film.
New York Times
Sept. 4, 2018
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.
Chicago Reader
March 29, 2018
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.
Washington Post
Oct. 24, 2018
