Documentary Feature | 2009
Director: Noah Hutton
Producer: Sam Howard
Co-Producer: Sara Kendall
Executive Producer: Jonathan Demme
Executive Producer: Robert Hariri
Executive Producer: Granger Whitelaw
Edited by Alex Footman and Noah Hutton
Original Score by Noah Hutton
Winner: Best Documentary Feature, Oxford Film Festival 2009
DVDs will be available here soon: please stay tuned.
Crude Independence is a documentary film about the heartland in the process of transplanting itself, and its new heart is pumping oil. In 2006, the United States Geological Survey estimated there to be more than 200 billion barrels of crude oil resting in a previously unreachable formation beneath western North Dakota. With the advent of new drilling technologies, oil companies from far and wide are descending on small rural towns across the state with men and machinery in tow. Director Noah Hutton takes us to the town of Stanley (population 1300), sitting atop the largest oil discovery in the history of the North American continent, and captures the change wrought by the unprecedented boom. Through revealing interviews and breathtaking imagery of the northern plains, Crude Independence is a rumination on the future of small town America—a tale of change at the hands of the global energy market and America’s unyielding thirst for oil.