The Last Buffalo Hunt

One of the last herds of wild buffalo still grazes close to Hanksville, Utah. Every year, the animals are hunted and this is known locally as ‘Utah’s Lottery’. For this observing film essay, Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch followed the hunt for five years.
In Schmitt’s typically unpolished style, the cowboys, history and the landscape are more important than the occasionally shocking buffalo hunt. Confronting the myth of the free landscape, they posit images of rifles, monstrous casinos, plastic tepees and fake hunters recommending their wares in a department store. Schmitt and Lynch question the authenticity of the myths surrounding the Wild West and the individualism on which American ideology is based.
Just as in her California Company Town (2008), about ghost towns in California, Schmitt shows that history always leaves its tracks in the landscape. The everyday activities of the cowboys are cultural rituals on the verge of extinction.

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