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Calgary Underground 2014 Interview: LOVE AND TERROR ON THE HOWLING PLAINS OF NOWHERE, by Kurt Halfyard for Twitch

24 Nov 2014|

One of the unheralded diamonds in the rough on the documentary circuit this year is Dave Jannetta’s documentary on the denizens of Chadron, Nebraska, evocatively titled Love And Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.

The film is an adaptation of Poe Ballantine’s memoir of the same name and involves Ballantine’s amateur sleuthing of the great crime that occurred in his communit: a math professor went missing in the freezing winter of 2006 only to be found in the spring burned alive, bound to a small tree.

If, like me, you are inclined towards a little bit of doc-genre mashing, this Love and Terror is a kind of catnip of the form. It is an idiosyncratic autobiography slash character study commingled with true crime investigation and liberally sprinkled with the regional specificity of an episode of This American Life or Twin Peaks. If you are lucky enough to be in Calgary at the moment, it is screening in the Calgary Underground Film Festival CUFF.Docs sidebar.

To read the entire interview, go to Twitch.