Own the rights?
I had the pleasure of seeing this piece at the Oxford Film Festival, where it won best documentary in a very impressive field. Visually, the film is beautiful and striking; sun-soaked shots of wheat fields are often interrupted by fire-breathing steel behemoths, the instruments of the oil industry. Director Noah Hutton certainly has a talented eye. He also has an ability that is much less apparent but nonetheless essential to documentary film-making: he extracts the dramatic material he needs from all of his interviews. This involves making his subjects feel at ease, a process for which the affable Hutton (I shook his hand after the Q & A at the screening) seems to have been born. Moreover, he chooses a diverse cast of characters--such as an ebullient young gas station clerk, drunken roughneck black-gold miners, and some of the metamorphosed nouveau riche--in order to paint a comprehensive picture of a town affected, in its entirety, by our 21st century version of the gold rush: the oil boom. Even more impressive is that Hutton was by far the youngest entry in the festival. I hope and suspect that this movie will achieve distribution, and I expect that "Crude Independence" is the initiation of a successful film-making career for Hutton and company.
You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the 'Update' button will take you through a step-by-step process.