Bisbee ‘17
2018 • 78’ • USA
Radically combining collaborative documentary, western, and musical elements, BISBEE ‘17 follows several members of a close-knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly 2,000 immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbours, 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. This film 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 its 100th anniversary thus confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionisation, environmental damage, and corporate corruption with haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.
Director / Producer:
Robert Greene
Producers:
Douglas Tirola, Susan Bedusa, Bennett Elliott
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Sundance Film Festival 2018 [World Premiere]
Visions du Reel 2018
Hot Docs 2018
Jeonju Film Festival 2018, Korea
Sydney Film Festival 2018
Melbourne Film Festival 2018
New Zealand Film Festival 2018
BFI London Film Festival 2018
One World 2018, Romania
Los Cobos Film Festival 2018, Mexico
RIDM 2018
Cinema Verité 2018, Iran
CPH:DOX 2018 -
“Robert Greene’s latest documentary uses the re-enactment of a tragedy to examine a legacy of conflict and repression.”
— The New York Times“The director once again opens an eerie, liminal space between reality and its representation, in which minds as curious as his own are free to wander.”
— LA Times“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 Washington Post
“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.” — Time Out
Filmmaker’s Biography
Robert Greene is an associate professor and the Filmmaker-in-Chief for the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. his latest film PROCESSION (Netflix) premiered in 2021. Other titles include the Sundance award winning KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016), the Gotham Awards nominated ACTRESS (2014) and the Gotham Awards nominated KATI WITH AN I (2010). Robert has edited over a dozen features, including HER SMELL (2018), GOLDEN EXITS (2017), QUEEN OF EARTH (2015) and LISTEN UP PHILIP (2014) by Alex Ross Perry, Nick Berardini’s KILLING THEM SAFELY (2015), Amanda Rose Wilder’s award winning APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT (2014) and Charles Poekel’s Spirit Awards-nominated CHRISTMAS, AGAIN. He has served as a Sundance Edit Lab Advisor and was on the U.S. Documentary Jury for Sundance 2017. Robert writes about documentary for outlets such as Sight & Sound and Hyperallergic.
Greene was an inaugural Sundance Art of Nonfiction fellow in 2015 and is a three-time nominee for Best Director at the Cinema Eye Honors. The Independent named Greene one of its 10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2014 and he received the 2014 Vanguard Artist Award from the San Francisco DocFest. His first documentary, OWNING THE WEATHER, was screened at the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.