Bisbee ’17
2018, 112 minutes, Digital, PG
USA
Language: English
Director: Robert Green
Distributor: 4th Row Films
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.
“The film is a large-scale study of political psychology, an expedition of historical archeology, and a form of drama therapy for a community that, in crucial ways, reflects the pathologies and the conflicts of the country at large. With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.”
— Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“A fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.”
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire