Bisbee '17

Released Sep 5, 2018

2h 4m

Documentary

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List

93%

61 Reviews

Tomatometer

61%

100+ Ratings

Audience Score

Locals stage re-creations of the town's controversial past.

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Critics Consensus

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.

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dave d

Bisbee '17 was a 2018 film directed by Robert Greene. Partially documentary and partially acted, it's based on a true story Western. It chronicles the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, 100 years later. This gets a little goofy as the actors often give backgrounds of themselves. Some may call this more of a reenactment, but it's small town theatre acting. There is a lot of information here, but I wanted to know in great detail about the deportations of Americans to other states. Can anyone imagine that this happened 100 years ago. Remarkable. There are bizarre musical numbers which are a gimmick. It's hard to know if it's the documentarians who are paying the actors or if it's the city. Most are locals, but there are a few "professionals" mixed in. It's just kinda lays there. Take it or leave it movie that should have been a lot better with a better narrative structure. Final Score: 6.1/10

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

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Audience Member

Very repetitious. The people of Bisbee, AZ have mixed feelings about an illegal, forced emigration in 1917. Again and again and again. Okay, I got it after the first 15 minutes. I was hoping for more history and less current opinion. But then they found a way to get the same current opinion over and over and over.

Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars

02/17/23

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Audience Member

Different times, only those living during this period know what really happened.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

02/09/23

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Audience Member

i thought it was one of the best movies I saw this year.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

02/25/23

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Audience Member

The movie is a pathetic attempt to justify rampant racism, rich privilege and environmental destruction in Arizona. The wobblies and abused mine workers are vilified, not explained. This is not a documentary, it is blatant propaganda by a rich family trying to justify past atrocities..

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

02/20/23

Full Review

Audience Member

First the story itself is fascinating—a town’s secret vigilante deportation? The mix of traditional documentary and re-enactment of a shocking event by modern day locals enables us to see residents come to terms with the history of the town that can’t help remind us of current political divisions. The filmmaker takes great care to not chose sides while allowing the town to wrestle with the ghosts of the past. Highly recommend.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

10/06/18

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Bisbee '17: Trailer 1

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Mark Asch

Film Comment Magazine

Bisbee '17 speaks to the stakes of local history and amateur genealogy for places and people that are twinkling out of living memory.

Oct 30, 2018

Full Review

Ann Hornaday

Washington Post

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.

Rated: 3.5/4

Oct 24, 2018

Full Review

Chuck Bowen

Slant Magazine

The film's epic canvas fuses a procedural documentary with tableaux that wouldn't be out of place in a horror western.

Rated: 4/4

Oct 19, 2018

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Vadim Rizov

Filmmaker Magazine

A lot of the method relies upon scenes in which characters are given a prompt whose successful execution is less the point than the moment when something goes wrong and a revealing moment that couldn’t possibly staged breaks through...

Jan 6, 2023

Full Review

Jason Adams

My New Plaid Pants

It's a post-modern sort of spirit photography, as the ectoplasm of the past spews into visibility, possession like, a document of how we're all whether we realize it or not formed out of the molecules of the dead

Jul 2, 2021

Full Review

Dustin Chang

Floating World

Greene is not only a good filmmaker but a great teacher. Serrano belongs to the generation which will inherit this country very soon, is awoke. The film deeply affected me deeply on an emotional level.

Feb 13, 2021

Full Review

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Synopsis

Locals stage re-creations of the town's controversial past.

Director: Robert Greene
Producer: Dan Cogan, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Davis Guggenheim, Jenny Raskin, Jonathan Silberberg, Nicole Stott, Laurene Powell-Jobs
Distributor: 4th Row Films
Production Co: Doc Society
Genre: Documentary
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Sep 5, 2018, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Apr 24, 2019
Box Office (Gross USA): $114.6K
Runtime: 2h 4m

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