Anti-Hate Program becomes Active Third Side in Montana Community

Adapted from PBS POV website

The Working Group has been helping local communities deal with intolerance and violence by holding film screenings and community discussions. When film maker Patrice O'Neill and crew got to Kalispell Montana, however, they realized they had landed in the midst of a conflict too complex to be comprehended, much less soothed, by a few community meetings.

Green swastikas were burned to protest environmental laws. A radio talk show host regularly called for the "eradication" of "green slime" while broadcasting the addresses of local environmental activists. Lug nuts were loosened on a car belonging to an anti-hate campaigner's daughter. While loggers and mill workers were facing lost jobs and rising living costs, right-wing extremists plied them with racist and anti-government rhetoric. Most ominously — in news that flashed across the nation and even around the world — a shadowy terror group called Project 7 was discovered with a cache of arms and a hit list of local government officials, police officers and their families.

It was the unmistakably rising tension in the town that led ex-police officer Brenda Kitterman to invite The Working Group to bring its grassroots anti-hate program, Not in Our Town, to Flathead Valley.

The Working Group ended up staying two years, earning the trust — or at least the willingness to speak candidly on camera — of antagonists on all sides of the Flathead Valley land wars, while documenting the valley's increasingly tense web of conflict, intimidation and public invective. From the outset, the filmmakers show they are not "strike a match" documentary makers. Far from heating up the action for dramatic effect, the filmmakers aim for the drama of a community seeking to restore its sense of kinship in the face of mounting stresses from within and without. In "The Fire Next Time," they appear to have crafted the rare documentary that widens communication — with signal exceptions — between declared enemies.  The documentary seeks to find out how the contentiousness in the Flathead Valley could take such a bitter and destructive turn — and once taken, how a community can marshal the will to pull itself back.