Bisbee '17

Directed by: Robert Greene

2018 | USA | 112 minutes

Radically combining collaborative documentary, western, and musical elements, the new film by Robert Greene follows several members of a 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. Bisbee ’17 documents locals as they play characters and stage dramatic scenes from the controversial story, culminating in a large scale 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.

"A bracing documentary that blends fiction and reality in ways that both complicate and enhance the material's core themes." - Nick Schager, Variety

No reservations are required. Seating is first come, first serve. 

This film is a part of Film for Thought, a series of screenings sponsored by the Advancing Intercultural Studies project and the UCR Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.