“Caught in the Headlights,” the newest film by local documentary film company High Plains Films, premieres as part of the International Wildlife Film Festival on Monday, May 15, at 7:30 p.m. The screening takes place at the Wilma Theater, and filmmakers Doug Hawes-Davis, Margot Higgins, and C. Wolf Drimal will be in attendance to answer questions following the screening. The film contains graphic visual images of dead animals, and may not be appropriate for all viewers.

Over the past decade, local documentary filmmaking company High Plains Films has carved out something of a niche for itself, making films that address the points of conflict between humans and animals. Two previous films in particular, “Killing Coyote” and “Varmints,” focused on people who willfully kill animals that they consider to be nuisances.

So when two University of Montana graduate students came to High Plains Films founder Doug Hawes-Davis with a proposal for a film about road kill, the topic immediately struck him as right up his alley.

“People shooting animals with guns, that's deliberate, whereas this film focuses on killings that are accidental,” says Hawes-Davis. “We've probably all run over an animal in our lifetimes, and yet there aren't really any public forums where this issue is being addressed. So it seemed like a great idea for a film.”

The result is “Caught in the Headlights,” which Hawes-Davis co-produced with the two students, Margot Higgins and C. Wolf Drimal. The 53-minute film premieres next Monday as part of the International Wildlife Film Festival.

Hawes-Davis recognizes that the topic isn't exactly feel-good Discovery Channel fare. Few besides the morbidly curious care to contemplate carcasses mangled by motorists.

“Having done ‘Killing Coyote' and others where we've been raked over the coals by some segments of the film community for how gruesome they are, we were especially sensitive to that issue in making this film,” says Hawes-Davis. “We really felt it was important to accomplish this film without turning the gruesome images into a sledgehammer.”

On top of that challenge, the lack of public furor over the topic meant that the filmmakers couldn't rely on outspoken activists and the built-in drama of public hearings and demonstrations to drive the subject home.

So Hawes-Davis, Higgins and Drimal set out to find people whose lives intersected with road kill in interesting and unexpected ways.

Perhaps surprisingly, they found plenty.

They found Kate Davis, founder of Raptors of the Rockies, who has spent much of her life rehabilitating birds of prey that have been injured by vehicles.

They also found Richard Huffman, an auto-body painter who experiences near-misses on his way to work every day, and who spends his days patching up the results of other people's collisions with animals.

There's Peter Bevis, an artist from Seattle who creates bronze sculptures cast from the remains of road kill he collects.

And there are the workers who spend their days actually collecting road kill from our roadways.

The film allows these characters to speak for themselves, telling how their lives became intertwined with this unfortunate consequence of life in an automobile-dependent society. Hawes-Davis is a devotee of the cinema verite style of documentary filmmaking, preferring as little editorial influence on subject-matter as possible.

The result, in this case, is a somewhat meandering but disarmingly personal examination of the topic as it is experienced by the film's subjects.

“We really wanted to tell an abbreviated version of these people's life stories and their connection on this issue,” explains Hawes-Davis. “Hopefully people can really connect with at least one of these characters, and thereby think more about this issue.”