A film documenting the journey of four men who rode adopted wild horses across the country will have a screening in Billings Friday.
The film “Unbranded” is being shown across the country.
Phillip Baribeau of Bozeman remembers the call proposing this project.
"Ben Masters called me completely out of the blue and told me who he was, he’s got 3 other friends, and his crazy idea of adopting and training wild mustangs and riding them across America from Mexico to Canada."
The filmmaker says he told Masters that’s incredible but that he didn’t know how to ride a horse and maybe he wasn’t the right person for this job.
"And he reassured me, he’s like ‘all I care about is can you handle yourself in the backcountry? Can you camp, can you film you know in rain, snow, hail and all those things?’ and those I don’t have a problem with because that’s primarily what I do."
"Did it ever occur to you that this might be, I don’t want to put a judgement on it but sort of a crazy, hair-brained idea, possibly life threatening?"
"Oh, absolutely I had to ride a mustang as well," says Baribeau. "I wasn’t thrown on some pony that’s been broken for the last 10 years, broken in, that is."
Baribeau says the appeal of this documentary is it’s a coming of age movie for these four men from Texas, as is pointed out in this clip from the movie’s trailer.
Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. And sometimes that bad judgment can be pretty horrific.
Like going some 20 miles through the arid west in between sources of water, riding along the sheer cliffs in the Grand Canyon, and encounters with wildlife and cactus along the route. Still, Baribeau says the four men had a complex story to tell.
"The whole reason Ben and these guys chose to use Mustangs is to raise awareness of what’s going on."
This documentary tells of the conflict around wild horses from view-point of ranchers, wild horse advocates, and Bureau of Land Management officials. That story is woven into the adventures along this 3,000 mile horseback journey.
"Everything happened for real," says Baribeau. "And we’re real proud of the fact that we didn’t stage anything and there’s these things that happened that if we did write a movie around these guys that are traveling we would have wrote different things, ‘like wouldn’t be great if this happened or that happened.’ And things just played out organically and we’re all happy with that."
This film was funded through a Kickstarter campaign with a production crew made up mainly of Montanans. There’s a book that accompanies the film, also titled Unbranded.
