The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is once again underway in Missoula. The annual event spotlights real life stories, some with international flavor and plenty from right here in our own backyard. MTPR's Austin Amestoy sat down with the director of a film recounting the dramatic days before, during and after the 2022 Yellowstone floods.
Film Clip: It had been a typical beautiful June week …
Austin Amestoy: In June 2022, residents in Yellowstone National Park's gateway communities nervously watched as a torrent of rain descended on their towns. In the nearby mountains. Melting snow was swept away by the water, resulting in a series of floods that washed out roads and homes and cut off some communities for days. It was billed as a 1 in 500 year event, a name adopted by filmmaker Hugo Sindelar’s new documentary recounting the disaster and its impacts on the people who call the Yellowstone region home.
Film Clip: Hearing snaps that sounded like cannon shots, realizing it was really big trees floating down the river. Their branches would catch on the cottonwoods on the bank and snap off.
Austin Amestoy: And director Hugo Sindelar is here with me now. He's an assistant professor of film at Montana State University in Bozeman. Hugo, hello.
Hugo Sindelar: Great to meet you, Austin. Thanks for having me.
Austin Amestoy: My first question really is when you knew that this was an event that needed your camera.
Hugo Sindelar: Yeah. So I live in Bozeman, Montana, which as many people in Montana know is very close to Yellowstone. I mean, we got a significant river rise in the Bozeman area. And so I went out to one of the local rivers, the Gallatin River, and just was kind of wanting to see it for myself. There was a bridge in the area that was kind of teetering, it didn't end up going in the river, but some people were able to watch from a safe distance. And I always have my camera with me, so I just started filming, realized that this was a regional event, and that day, so the day of the high water was I decided, you know, there needs to be a film about this.
Austin Amestoy: Hugo, you set the stage for this film with the sort of slice of life interviews with folks in Red Lodge, Cooke City, Silver Gate and Gardiner. You know, these are business owners, pastors, local government folks. How did you choose the voices that you wanted to tell this story?
Hugo Sindelar: The people in the film and the voices we have are diverse, and they all came to the film in different ways. So some of the people I had known of before spent a lot of time eating many delicious meals at the Wonderland Cafe in Gardiner. And I also made connections at these kind of benefit events. So we got out in the community and talked to people that were directly affected. And then Cooke City was a little bit of a combination, so Cook City was kind of fun in that I didn't have any direct connections there, and it can be hard to get in touch with people in Cooke City. So I just literally drove out there and kind of started knocking on doors. And a lot of people you hear in the flood were directly affected, so that's what was interesting to me as a filmmaker and my team. But also they had to be willing to appear in the film.
Austin Amestoy: Where were some of the areas you were able to get footage from for this film?
Hugo Sindelar: So a lot of the flood footage actually comes from residents or people that were there. Being based in Bozeman, I was able to film some of the high water around here, and that does make it into the film as some of the B-roll shots, we say. But I had an excellent producer named Ashley Lobel, who is a former student here and works in Bozeman as a freelance producer. And so she reached out to community members and we were able to kind of assemble footage that way. And so we had different community members in Red Lodge that had some — a lot of that is iPhone footage of the event. So we're able to reach out to them and they were willing to share it with us.
Austin Amestoy: Hugo, when this was going on and in the immediate aftermath, the news covered a lot of the physical and economic damage of the flood, you know, pretty extensively. But I'm wondering, from your experience reporting this documentary, what might viewers not understand about other short and long term impacts of this flood?
Hugo Sindelar: I think the biggest impact that people don't really talk about a lot around natural disasters, especially in the long term, is the mental health aspect. And that's something we heard a lot in interviews. So we would talk to people about, you know, how are you doing a few months after the flood? So a lot of the interviews in the film didn't occur right away. They occurred in the year after the flood and mental health came up a lot. And so I had a great editor on this, who's a current grad student at MSU. Her name is Andy Madsen, and she and I really wanted to elevate that mental health aspect in this piece. We feel like with natural disasters in our current news cycle, that everyone jumps in to help and repair some of those physical things like buildings and, you know, donate clothing and food and all that, but they don't realize that it takes a long time for people to recover from this, from that mental health aspect. And we wanted to shine a light on that because we, you know, for better or worse, sometimes the world moves on a little bit for these natural disasters. And these people to this day are still recovering. The Yodeler Motel, you know, is working on some ways to fix this lower floor. I think they might just be getting started on that now, and we're coming up on the three year anniversary. You know, they didn't have the capital right away to make those fixes, and so while we're on to the next story, these people are still dealing with the fallout.
Austin Amestoy: You know, when the credits rolled, I noticed that you had secured funding for this film from a number of sources, but one that caught my eye was FEMA. I thought that was really interesting. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, I think that's the right acronym. How does one get FEMA funding for a documentary?
Hugo Sindelar: Yeah, so that's an interesting story. So we have a great office of research here at Montana State University, and FEMA has these quick response research awards, and so they sent out a notice about that, kind of in the year after the flood. Oftentimes, as an artist and filmmaker, you don't really qualify for those sorts of grants. They're more for hard science and research, but they had a FEMA member, Daniel Green, for Region eight, which is our region who was on that email. And so I sent him an email and just inquired, you know, hey, would we be eligible for this funding? He replied back right away, let's do a phone call, you know, call me on the phone. And so we chatted, and he believed in the power of documentary. And so that's how FEMA got on board through their education research program.
Austin Amestoy: You know, from an artistic perspective, one of the things that really stood out to me about the film were the many shots of these locations in the rain. Rain is like a persistent motif in the movie for like, you know, the obvious reason of the cause of the flood. But we see rain even in parts of the documentary that aren't directly about the weather preceding the flood. So what feeling were you as a director trying to impart to the audience with that choice of using Rain as a motif?
Hugo Sindelar: We really wanted people to understand that, you know, rain was a key factor in this film — a key factor in the event, and so that's why it’s featured in the film. What really led to the flooding was rain on snow, which some people are aware of, but not a lot of people are. And rain on snow is when rain falls on snow. But the rain is warmer, right, and so as it percolates through the snow, it brings some of that water, it melts the snow in effect, and brings extra water down the mountain. And so, as one of our interviewees said, the whole mountain came down at once and we thought it was important to showcase the rain because it was a driving factor in what caused this event.
Austin Amestoy: Hugo, is there anything about the making of this film that you want audiences to know that we haven't talked about?
Hugo Sindelar: Well, I think the most important thing I want people to know is to get out and see the film. We had a lot of great subjects and interviewees in this film and they spent time with us sharing their story, and we really want to bring that story to wider audiences. We want people to learn what these people experienced and get it out there. And also I want people to know that if you want to hear longer stories from the flood, you can listen to our podcast, which is called Bison Jam. So it's bison jam.com, or if you search Bison Jam on any of your favorite podcast apps, you should find it. And we devoted our whole first season to the flood so you can dive into some of these stories in all these gateway communities in Yellowstone National Park in much more depth there.
Austin Amestoy: One in 500 has its world premiere on Tuesday the 18th at 4:30 p.m. at the Roxy Theater as a selection of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Hugo, thanks for talking about your film with me.
Hugo Sindelar: Great. Thanks for having me.
