For a decade, a Friday-night radio programme offered Montanans an unusually open invitation: telephone the studio and speak about almost anything fit for public discussion. Broadcast on Yellowstone Public Radio from 1997 to 2007, Your Opinion, Please became a modest civic forum, carrying the voices of residents across one of the most expansive and sparsely settled states in the US.
In this documentary, American filmmaker Marshall Granger draws from the programme’s archive and sets the callers’ reflections against carefully framed, largely motionless images of Montana’s roads, towns and immense landscapes. Conversations drift between the Iraq War, the pressures brought by local development and the elusive purpose of poetry, revealing how national anxieties mingle with intensely regional concerns.
Patiently edited and quietly observant, the short film builds its portrait through the contrast between still scenery and restless human thought. The result is both intimate and panoramic: a record of a particular place and era that may leave US viewers considering how much public conversation has changed since then – and how many of its deepest concerns have endured.
Director: Marshall Granger
Producer: Alana Waksman
Website: Your Opinion, Please
