“By combining jaw-clenching irony with behind-the-scenes footage, High Plains has created more than a dozen films that educate and expose the bizarre.” Missoula Independent, July 2001

“Eschewing rhetoric, hysteria, or commentary, the filmmakers employ a form of direct cinema that, in its restraint and layering of details, has a cumulative power.” Milton Tabbot, IFP New York 2005

“High Plains Films is embarked on a documentary study of the slowly evolving relationship of humanity to the rest of Creation, and they’re doing it better than anybody else that I know of right now.” Hal Herring, Mountain Gazette, 2002

“For High Plains Films, filmmaking isn't about big budgets or special effects. They stick to an even-handed, humane approach to filmmaking, yet never shy away from eliciting strong emotional responses.” High Country News, 2001

“Many critics have praised the 'objectivity' of High Plains Films. What they mean is that they let the people tell the story.” San Antonio Current, 2005

“This is what independent filmmaking is all about.” Missoula Independent, 2002

"High Plains has a unique ability to capture the ironies surrounding controversial issues – as well as the anger, the ignorance, the passion and the duplicity.” High Country News, 1998

When High Plains Films co-founders Doug Hawes-Davis and Drury Carr began making their first documentaries fifteen years ago, they had no training in filmmaking, or the support of an established filmmaking community. But they had an incredible passion and empathy for the stories they were telling. Armed with loaned cameras and editing equipment from the local community television station, they vigorously pursued their film projects while employed in various jobs to make ends meet. When their films began screening at festivals and other public screenings, the response was overwhelmingly positive. These were films that challenged, educated, and entertained audiences. They allowed people to think critically about wide-ranging questions about the relationship between human society and its culture, economy, and environment. Hawes-Davis and Carr knew they were onto something. High Plains Films was born.

Nearly fifteen years later, High Plains Films has won more than 40 awards, and our work has been screened in more than twenty countries and in hundreds of festivals, universities, libraries, conferences, and commercial theaters. Our films have been broadcast on national television, including the acclaimed PBS series P.O.V., which aired our feature Libby, Montana in 2007. Our work has been covered by dozens of national, regional, and local newspapers, journals, radio programs, and websites, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, USA Today, Mother Jones Magazine, High Country News, Salon.com, and E Magazine. Our films have been distributed to thousands of universities, high schools, public libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and individuals throughout the world. We have been honored with collective retrospectives at several prominent film festivals.

In 2001, Doug Hawes-Davis was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Montana Arts Council, which “seeks to recognize, reward and encourage outstanding individual artists in Montana." In 2005, Hawes-Davis and Carr were awarded the first “True West Visionary Award” at the True/False West Film Festival, given annually to a filmmaker that “places an indelible mark on the world of documentary filmmaking”. The True/False Festival director said of High Plains Films, “They are particularly inspirational as filmmakers because of the way that they tirelessly promote the medium of documentary film.”

Mention the phrase “nature documentary” or “wildlife film,” and for most people, film makers and the general public alike, the same images spring to mind. The cute and fuzzy baby animals cavorting in a flower-spangled meadow while perky music plays in the background; fearsome carnivores hunting their unwary prey while a narrator chronicles the chase in urgent, hushed tones; or majestic birds of prey soaring on thermals with equally majestic mountains towering in the background. These films generally document nature as separate from human impacts on nature. They seem to imply that nature is simply embodied in the mating rituals of lemmings or how fast a crocodile can eat a water buffalo. Those who live in places where “wild nature” is more abundant–where nature and culture often clash–realize that what happens in nature is often dependant on what humans allow to happen in nature. Every environmental question, every controversy about a threatened species, every contentious land use decision has less to do with biology than with human culture.

Recognizing that traditional nature films function as little more than escapist entertainment, and that most social issue films ignore the natural world, High Plains Films set out to create documentaries that accurately portray the fascinating and complex relationship between culture and the environment. High Plains Films strives to create films that tie together the human experience and the natural world. We would even go so far as to state that the one cannot document nature without documenting human interaction with nature. The opposite is true as well; one cannot fully document human experience without also documenting the environmental context.

Our films create a nexus between art, media, and education. We are dedicated to producing serious content with journalistic and scientific integrity. As one critic writes, “The common threads of High Plains Films are a journalistic approach that honors research and facts, and the discussion of issues from all points of view so as to present a deep and lasting understanding of them.” As we continue this purposeful approach, we integrate complex storytelling, strong character development, engaging plots, beautiful imagery and music, and blend it all with a healthy sense of humor. Whether roaming the western grasslands for a film about prairie dogs or trudging through the steep hills of Arkansas following an eccentric naturalist, our films are meant to empower people by helping them to understand the relationship between human society and the natural world.

High Plains Films has covered a wide range of subject matter. Issues about transportation, power, water in the American West; forest and wilderness conservation, public health and toxics; organized labor and corporate responsibility; ranching, mining, and motorized recreation on public and private lands; the politics of prairie dogs, coyotes, wild horses, and hunting; and the cultural values of American citizens. All of these films are designed to educate and challenge us to think critically about our society’s values and goals, and our common vision for the future.

Based on the number and diversity of colleges and universities, government agencies, and non-profit organizations that use our films in their own programs, we can say that these films are actually helping to make a difference. Our films help to frame discussions among various constituencies and educate the public about important issues that often little is known about. Here is an excerpt from a review of our first feature documentary, “As a result of films like Varmints, the rusty wheels of bureaucracy turned, and federal biologists took note that the prairie dog now occupies less than two percent of its original range. Shortly thereafter, prairie dogs are now being considered for listing as an endangered species." Or this from a San Antonio Current review of Libby, Montana, "If the political pressure to prosecute Grace's executives to the full extent of the law persists, it will be due in part to this deeply moving film."

Our films give audiences a glimpse of the cultural forces behind some of our most bitter debates on environmental, economic, and social policy. These are conflicts that represent competing worldviews and different interpretations of what is important and moral. We raise provocative questions about community values, liberty, consumerism, and the constantly evolving ideal of what the American Dream is all about.