''Welcome to Leith'' is a 2015 American

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

directed by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker about white supremacist

Craig Cobb Paul Craig Cobb is a white nationalist and white supremacist who created the video sharing website Podblanc. He states "my race (human categorization), race is my religion", and advocates "racial holy war" in accordance with the tenets of the Cre ...

's attempt to take over the North Dakota city

Leith Leith (; gd, Lìte) is a port area in the north of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, founded at the mouth of the Water of Leith. In 2021, it was ranked by '' Time Out'' as one of the top five neighbourhoods to live in the world. The earliest ...

. The film premiered on January 26, 2015 at the

2015 Sundance Film Festival The 2015 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 22 to February 1, 2015. ''What Happened, Miss Simone?'', a biographical documentary film about American singer Nina Simone, opened the festival. Comedy-drama film ''Grandma'', directed by Pa ...

and, after a

limited theatrical release __FORCETOC__ Limited theatrical release is a film distribution strategy of releasing a new film in a few theaters across a country, typically art house theaters in major metropolitan markets. Since 1994, a limited theatrical release in the Unite ...

on September 9, was broadcast on

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

' series ''

Independent Lens ''Independent Lens'' is a weekly television series airing on PBS featuring documentary films made by independent filmmakers. Past seasons of ''Independent Lens'' were hosted by Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Susan Sarandon, Edie Falco, Terrence Ho ...

'' on April 4, 2016.

Background

Leith is a town which had a population of 16 in 2010. In May 2012,

, an

American Canadian American Canadians are Canadians of American descent. The term is most often used to refer to Canadians who migrated from or have ancestry from the United States. Demography According to the 2016 Census, 29,590 Canadians reported American as ...

white nationalist Neo-Nazi, moved to Leith with the intention of building a community of people sharing his white nationalist ideology and gaining the electoral majority. He purchased 12 plots of land.

Production

Nichols and Walker, who are based in New York, flew to North Dakota two months after they read an August 2013 ''New York Times'' article about Craig Cobb's scheme to transform Leith into a white-supremacist town. They made three trips to Leith within an 8-month period, each around 4 weeks long, for the production of the film. 5 months were spent editing the film. In June 2014 Nichols and Walker launched a

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

campaign to raise funds for the production of the film. They surpassed their $60,000 goal, raising $64,751. The directors approached the project in many ways as a documentary version of a horror/western—the residents of Leith were scared and confused and felt as if one wrong move could end in violence. They aimed to capture the sense of fear and isolation that residents living in a town of 24 people 70 miles from anything experienced when Cobb made his takeover intentions public.

Reception

On July 25, 2017, ''Welcome to Leith'' was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary by the News & Doc Emmy Awards. The film received largely positive reviews from critics. 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 ...

, it holds a Certified Fresh 98% score based on 43 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's consensus states: "As disturbing as it is thought-provoking, ''Welcome to Leith'' offers an uncomfortable — and essential — glimpse into a part of society many Americans would much rather ignore."

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 ...

reports a 78 out of 100 rating based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". ''

Indiewire IndieWire (sometimes stylized as indieWIRE or Indiewire) is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollyw ...

'' critic Eric Kohn gave the documentary an A− grade, described it as "a stunning portrait of First Amendment rights pushed to their extremes".

References

External links

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''Welcome to Leith''
at ''

'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Welcome To Leith 2015 films 2015 documentary films 2010s thriller films American documentary films American independent films American thriller films Documentary films about racism in the United States Films shot in North Dakota Films set in North Dakota Grant County, North Dakota Kickstarter-funded documentaries Neo-Nazism in the United States First Run Features films Documentary films about North Dakota 2010s English-language films 2010s American films