{"id":9354,"date":"2012-02-21T05:56:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T12:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=9354"},"modified":"2023-11-14T13:20:13","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T19:20:13","slug":"boomtown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/boomtown\/","title":{"rendered":"Boomtown"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Directors Torben Bernhard and Travis Low breathe life into a relic of Utah\u2019s past with Boomtown<\/em>, their short film showing this week at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival <\/a>in Missoula, Montana. In competition for the \u201cBig Sky Award\u201d given to best documentary focused on the American West, their twelve-minute film is the only one I have seen. Its story follows the well-known arc of a former Western mining town\u2019s rise, heyday, and fall. Truly unforgettable, though, is the taut portrayal of Frisco, Utah as it unfolds through gorgeous cinematography, evocative sound, and expert research. Bernhard and Low recreate Frisco\u2019s stunted history in a film short on length yet long on resonance.<\/p>\n

Silver mining was a boom business in Utah in the mid-1800s, no more so than in Frisco, situated on the southeast side of the San Francisco Mountains, west of present-day Milford. Transportation and industry went hand in hand as Utah\u2019s railroad system expanded statewide. After the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869 across northern Utah, additional lines and extensions were laid: in 1871, the Utah Southern railroad line was extended from Salt Lake City to points south, reaching Frisco in 1879 via the Utah Southern Extension.<\/p>\n

As with other towns, rail transportation facilitated quick growth. At its heyday in the early 1880s, thousands inhabited Frisco as hundreds of men were employed to mine silver and ore in the Horn Silver Mine. The town included a hospital, general store, and multiple salons – it also saw lawlessness and multiple murders as residents grappled with a rough life on the frontier. Voice-overs by former residents tell the tale of a town full of promise, then laid to waste as the mining shaft, then mountainside caved in. One of the more poignant passages is heard as a female resident recounts making a life in a region short on natural resources: \u201cEverything you had, you couldn\u2019t raise anything up there, there was nothing. When I look back and think about it, why, it must have been quite a trial. But we never thought about it, because that is what we had to do and we did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film opens with a broad view of the landscape. It takes a moment to discern the material remnants of Frisco\u2019s former life: signs of human habitation and toil are represented by dilapidated wooden structures, the abandoned mine, and beehive-shaped stone-structured charcoal kilns. \u00a0Amidst beautifully framed ruins and rusted material objects strewn across the land, the only living creatures we see in Boomtown<\/em> are a tarantula skirting across the grass and a bull snake slithering across a gravel path. The once forgotten graveyard holds just a few of the town\u2019s many dead. Yet it is a few past residents who bring the town alive to the viewer as the film seamlessly incorporates historical information through written text, audio tracks of interviews with former residents, and historical photographs – all granting us a glimpse of a functioning society in its prime.<\/p>\n

The inscription \u201cGone, but not forgotten\u201d is etched on the side of stacked stones. Bernhard, Low, and their crew assure us with Boomtown<\/em> that Frisco will not be forgotten. My only regret in Boomtown<\/em> is its length. The film left me wanting more of everything it has to offer: our history retold through the beauty of expert film making; the remembrance of a lost, minimalist life surrounded by the sound of high winds and cawing birds; luscious images of rolling desert vistas drenched in golden sunlight, covered in brush and sage. This is the story of just one former Utah town in many, a story which can – and I believe should – be told time and again as we grapple today with the same issues as yesterday: how to make a go at living on these awe inspiring, sometimes forbidding, Western lands.<\/p>\n

Boomtown<\/em> is part of the Lost and Found Series<\/em>, five short documentary films by Utah filmmakers that explore “what it means to lose something and what we can potentially gain from finding it again.” You can view a preview of Boomtown<\/em> here. Find out more about the Lost and Found Series<\/em> here.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Torben Bernhard and Travis Low’s documentary short about Frisco, Utah, screening this week at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1515,"featured_media":9355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bytes","category-film"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Screen-shot-2012-02-20-at-8.11.12-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-16 10:08:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1515"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9354"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71267,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9354\/revisions\/71267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}