Institute History
Description
Bisbee '17 is a nonfiction feature film by Sundance award winning director Robert Greene set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border. The story follows several members of the close knit community as they prepare to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee's darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation, where 1200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes by a deputized force, banished to the middle of the desert and left to die. As the townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past, locals will dress as miners and begin staging dramatic recreations of scenes from the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes will be based on subjective versions of the story and "directed," in a sense, by locals with conflicting views of the event. These scenes will relate directly to characters' real lives and will build towards a massive attempted restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. Many of these in-the-moment dramatizations will feature the locals singing old IWW protest songs and confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.