American Refuge

Christian Hammons and Eric Coombs Esmail

2025 / 83 minutes
United States / United States
English

For decades, people have come to the forest around the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado to escape their past and reinvent themselves. Some end up settling in the town, becoming residents with homes, jobs, and a sense of belonging. Some just pass through, continuing on to warmer climates when winter comes or moving on when local officials crack down. Some remain in the precarious margins, in the forest outside of town. They say they have nowhere else to go. They dwell in the liminal space between civilization and wilderness, crafting new stories about their lives, blurring the line between the real and the really made up. In this space, the settled and the unsettled come into conflict, and the result is often violence - a murder, a forest fire, a bomb at the police station. For some residents, the solution is to bring the forest-dwellers into the fold of civilization. For others, the solution is to clear them out and return the space to the wilderness. For the people who live in the forest, the danger is the civilization that forced them there. They have no choice but to stay, even if it takes an act of creative self-destruction.