BISBEE ’17 is a nonfiction feature film set in Bisbee, Arizona, USA, an old mining town close to the Mexican border. Radically combining collaborative documentary, western and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close-knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour.
Bisbee '17 by Robert Greene 2018, 35mm, 112 minutes, USA
In 1917, nearly thirteenhundred 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.
The 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 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 and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.
AWL_029 BISBEE ‘17
wednesday 20 march 2019
doors open: 20.15
start program: 20.30
pre sale tickets: WORM
Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam