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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.
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