God's Country
(Le pays de Dieu)
US, 1985, 35mm, color, 90 min.
Invited by PBS to make a film in the U.S., Malle decided to focus on the rural community of Glencoe, sixty miles west of Minneapolis. With its well-kept farms and churches, amateur theater groups and town dances, Glencoe seemed like an idyllic example of the American heartland. Caught up with other projects, Malle put his Glencoe footage aside and only went back to the film in 1985. Returning to the town for a follow-up, Malle discovered a very different scene. The farm crisis was in full swing, with weekly foreclosures on long-held family farms. People had begun fleeing to Florida or the Southwest in search of work. Moreover, Malle began to see some of the cracks in the town's postcard-perfect image, as frustrated farmers blame their troubles on a host of real and imagined enemies. God's Country is an unsettling chronicle of a very difficult era that offers uncanny echoes of the experiences Malle had depicted in dramatic form in Alamo Bay.
