''Bisbee '17'' (also ''Bisbee '17: A Story Told in Six Chapters''
[) is a 2018 American film directed by Robert Greene. Partially documentary and partially ]based on a true story Based on a True Story may refer to:
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Western
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, it reflects on the events of the 1917 Bisbee Deportation
The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested them beginning on July 12, 1917, in Bisbee, A ...
, 100 years later; it is set in Bisbee, Arizona
Bisbee is a city in and the county seat of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, United States. It is southeast of Tucson and north of the Mexican border. According to the 2020 census, the population of the town was 4,923, down from 5,575 i ...
, both in 1917 and 2017.
Synopsis
Five years after its statehood and a few months after the United States' entry into World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, xenophobia
Xenophobia () is the fear or dislike of anything which is perceived as being foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between an in-group and out-group and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, a ...
and anti-unionism is growing in the southernmost towns of Arizona near the Mexican border. In Bisbee, immigrant workers organized and were violently rounded up and transported to the desert in New Mexico; not as famous as the events in nearby Tombstone, the deportation didn't live in the national memory, but is quietly remembered by the townsfolk today. And so at the 100 year anniversary, Bisbee citizens organized a re-enactment. The events unfold again, as if they were happening in 1917, framed alongside interviews with the present day locals.
Production
Multiple producers are listed for the film, they are, alphabetically: Susan Bedusa, Dan Cogan
Dan Cogan is an American film producer. He has produced multiple documentary films including ''The Queen of Versailles'' (2012), ''How to Survive a Plague'' (2012), ''The Hunting Ground'' (2015), ''Icarus'' (2017), ''Won't You Be My Neighbor'' (2 ...
, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Bennett Elliott, Davis Guggenheim
Philip Davis Guggenheim (born November 3, 1963) is an American writer, director and producer. His credits include ''NYPD Blue'', '' ER'', '' 24'', ''Alias'', ''The Shield'', '' Deadwood'', and the documentaries ''An Inconvenient Truth'', ''It M ...
, Laurene Powell Jobs
Laurene Powell Jobs ( Powell; born November 6, 1963)United States birth records is an American billionaire businesswoman and executive. She is the founder and chair of Emerson Collective and XQ Institute. Powell Jobs resides in Palo Alto, Califo ...
, Jenny Raskin, Jonathan Silberberg, Nicole Stott, Douglas Tirola
Douglas Tirola, also known as Doug Tirola, is an American filmmaker and writer who has worked as a director, executive producer and a producer. He is the owner and president of 4th Row Films, a movie and television production company. Tirola's w ...
, Scott Woelfel, and Stacey Woelfel.
The cast are local people, with a lot of focus placed on Fernando Serrano, a young Mexican-American who became the face of the film. His performance has been praised by several critics.
The film was scored by Keegan DeWitt, with '' Vox'' saying that the score "sounds ripped from a ghost movie, spiky and glassy and a little dissonant", but that it fits the tone of the film.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
the film has an approval rating of based on reviews from critics . The site's critical consensus reads, "''Bisbee '17'' offers one town's reckoning with its own history as a compelling argument that the mistakes of the past are truly corrected only when they're faced head on." It is listed as a "must see" with "universal acclaim" on Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, having an 87 average from 22 reviews.
Writing for RogerEbert.com
''RogerEbert.com'' is an American film review website that archives reviews written by film critic Roger Ebert for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' and also shares other critics' reviews and essays. The website, underwritten by the ''Chicago Sun-Times' ...
, Matt Zoller Seitz
Matt Zoller Seitz (born December 26, 1968) is an American film and television critic, author and film-maker.
Career
Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com, and the television critic for '' New York'' magazine and Vulture.com, as ...
gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, praising its exploration of more than just the event itself and for the use of certain images, saying about both that "a series of shots of carved-out quarry rock, the multicolored layers stacked up in the frame become metaphors for the movie you're watching, one of many that Bisbee '17 supplies as it goes along". He also wrote that Errol Morris
Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of its subjects. In 2003, his documentary film '' The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara ...
was clearly a big influence on the film.
'' Vanity Fair'' looked closer at the interviews with Bisbee residents, and compared the debate with the nation's present political situation in 2017; it notes that some of the views are "disconcerting" but is glad that the film doesn't make judgement. Alissa Wilkinson of ''Vox.com'' also compared the past with the present, calling the film an "unsettling cipher for America".
The film's use of acting within its narrative has been compared to the other Greene films ''Actress
An actor or actress is a person who portrays a Character (arts), character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek ...
'' and ''Kate Plays Christine
''Kate Plays Christine'' is a 2016 American documentary film written and directed by Robert Greene. It follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil's preparation for the role of Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who committed suicide on live television in 1974, ...
'' by multiple reviewers.
References
{{Reflist
2018 films
American films based on actual events
American documentary films
Documentary films about labor relations in the United States
History of labor relations in the United States
Labor-related violence in the United States
Miners' labor disputes in the United States
Labor disputes in Arizona
Riots and civil disorder in Arizona
History of Cochise County, Arizona
Bisbee, Arizona
Vigilantism in the United States
2010s English-language films
2010s American films