Who Gets to Own The West?

Back in 2019, a simpler time before the pandemic, the New York Times put out a piece (written by Julie Turkewitz) on the Wilks Brothers. They grew up in a goat shed, didn’t finish high school, and ended up building a billion dollar fracking business. What did they do with that money… start buying up land. Today just 100 families own 42 million acres of land across America, and it’s growing. Battles over private land have been a defining part of the West since the 1800s when the federal government began doling out free acreage to encourage expansion… But now in 2022, Idaho (Boise in particular) has become the least affordable housing market in the country. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah have all been affected in a similar fashion.

The age of settlers is now over, what we’re left with — soaring housing costs, and a middle class that can no longer survive in cities that were very much affordable even just a few years ago, setting into motion a mass exodus many are calling “The Great Migration”. This is what our film tries to explore. How a sense of home and belonging can be uprooted so quickly. What makes a place what it is? The location or the people?

— AB