God's Country

Director: Louis Malle

1985 / 89min / 16mm

In 1979, Malle visited the small town of Glencoe, Minnesota—60 miles west of Minneapolis—to make a documentary for PBS. The project remained incomplete for six years, until he returned to explore how the community had been responding to the mounting crisis in agricultural overproduction—the farm crisis that peaked in the mid-’80s. An unfailingly respectful and unpretentious document of everyday life, of long-fostered traditions, and of unfailing Midwestern politesse in what is sometimes dismissed as “flyover country,” and of a part of the nation that then-President Reagan’s “trickle-down” economy very much failed to water.

Distributor: Janus Films

Introduction by filmmaker Claire Duguet on Sunday, June 7th

Part of Louis Malle: Portraits of America