The Last Hillbilly

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Brian Ritchie’s ancestors came to East Kentucky as independent pioneers. Their sons worked in the mines, and now Ritchie himself is barely able to maintain what’s left of the family farm. “In three generations, we went from mountaineers to dirty coalminers to ignorant out-of-work hillbillies”, he says, in one of his many brave and honest reflections on reality.
Ritchie calls himself a “hillbilly” defiantly, well-aware of the word’s slanderous connotations. He knows that from the outside, people like him are perceived as violent, ignorant, and racist—but Ritchie is none of those things. With a series of unexpected scenes showing his family and neighbors in a vanishing world, the film allows Ritchie to dismantle, and sometimes reinforce, the image of the last settlers in the stunning Appalachian Mountains.

With the support of the Institut Français d’Israël.

Previous Festivals: IDFA

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