Documentary looks at issues of hate and free speech in rural North Dakota town
WELCOME TO LEITH (Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker, 2015)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Opens Wednesday, September 9
212-924-7771
www.welcometoleithfilm.com
www.ifccenter.com
In 2012, white supremacist leader Craig Cobb began buying up plots of land in Leith, North Dakota, a rural community of twenty-four people in the middle of nowhere, with the intention of taking over the local government and spreading his message of hate. Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker document the ensuing battle between the interlopers and the town residents in Welcome to Leith, which opens September 9 at the IFC Center. Inspired by an August 2013 New York Times article about Cobb and Leith, director, producer, and cinematographer Nichols and director, producer, and editor Walker headed to North Dakota, where people on both sides of the escalating controversy gave them remarkable access. As Cobb — and instigator, inciter, manipulator, and provocateur — his right-hand man, Kynan Dutton, Vanguard News Network operator Alex Linder, White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement, and members of other hate groups support what they believe is essentially a legal coup, Mayor Ryan Schock, Sheriff Steve Bay, photographer Gregory Bruce, Southern Poverty Law Center journalist Ryan Lenz, prosecutor Todd Schwarz, and the citizens of Leith examine their options to fight Cobb, who has brought fear and the concrete threat of potential violence to the small, peaceful community, reminiscent of what a group of neo-Nazis did in Skokie in 1977-78. Nichols and Walker, who previously collaborated on Flex Is Kings, incorporate archival footage, town meetings, courtroom scenes, new interviews, and scary video shot by Dutton’s girlfriend, Deborah Henderson, to create a frightening look at race-baiting, the First and Second Amendments, the U.S. legal system, and, most of all, the rising issue of hate in modern-day America. The film plays out like an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but it’s all too real. Leith might seem a long way away geographically, but it’s a lot closer than you might think.