Film: "Bisbee ’17"
This innovative documentary western recounts an Arizona town’s darkest hour—the deportation of 1,300 immigrant miners in 1917.
Discussion follows with Prof. Desiree Garcia and Georgetown Prof. Katherine Benton-Cohen, historical advisor to the film.
Radically combining collaborative documentary, western-genre and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close-knit Bisbee, Arizona community as they attempt to reckon with the town’s darkest hour. In 1917, 1,300 mainly immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars and shipped to New Mexico. This long-buried and largely forgotten event came to be known as the Bisbee Deportation. A town seven miles from the US/Mexican border, Bisbee is uncomfortably familiar with current political tensions around deportation and immigration.
Somehow director Robert Greene was able to convince the entire town to recreate the incident on the day of its 100th anniversary, and the resulting group-therapy experiment makes for a fascinating film. Descendants of the original evictors cosplay with brandish rifles and scowls while local actors take to the streets chanting labor slogans. These dramatized scenes, based on subjective memory, buried guilt and suppressed racism, unfold as the remarkably game Bisbeeans attempt to exorcise their collective ghosts. But if Bisbee ’17 is a ghost story, it’s haunted by century-old conflicts that are still playing out today.
D: Robert Greene, US, 2018, 2h4m
