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Montana production company’s new film in festival

Stones

“Skips Stones for Fudge,” a new movie from the Montana production company Highway Goat, has been selected for inclusion in the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which will run Feb. 19-28 this year, in Missoula. Among those involved in the making of the movie, which will be screened at 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 20 at the Wilma Theatre in downtown Missoula, is Ryan Seitz, a graduate of Billings Senior High School, and Alex Downey, a native of Butte. Their new movie takes an in-depth look at the world of competitive stone-skipping, focusing on Russ “Rock Bottom” Byars and Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner, two very different men who have long competed to be known as the best rock skipper in the world. Continue Reading →

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Trying to understand freight riders’ desperate freedom

Teens

“Bums,” they called them. “Lazy trash,” they said. I was standing at a railroad crossing in downtown Billings during a frenzied street dance when a slow-moving train passed by. Three modern-day hobos sat in one of the box cars—two young men and a young woman. The businessmen and women standing next to me that June afternoon apparently couldn’t help but comment to one another, as if reassuring one another that their lives were superior. Continue Reading →

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At the film festival: Years of work, one big night

MovieNight

Neil LaRubbio is a journalist and filmmaker currently working the oil fields of Colorado. He has written for High Country News and Vice.com. This is his inside look at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. I arrived at the little house after a 12-hour drive, sustained by canned-salmon sandwiches and loose tobacco. Brushed by years of soot, the little house sits 20  feet away from the Missoula rail yard. Continue Reading →

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