WATCH: What happens when fracking takes over your town

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WATCH TRAILER: What happens when fracking takes over your town

“The roads were cracking, the crime rate was rising."

[ http://www.salon.com/2014/09/27/the_roa ... your_town/ ]

Director Jesse Moss talks to Salon about "The Overnighters," his haunting portrait of a fracking boomtown gone bust

Lindsay Abrams Saturday, Sep 27, 2014 02:00 PM CAST


*** WATCH TRAILER: [ http://www.jessemoss.com/The-Overnighters ]

North Dakota is sitting on gold. The oil-rich Bakken formation, thanks to the advent of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, produces hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil each day; in one month this year, it produced as much oil as it had in all of 2004. And that means easy money, not just for North Dakotans, but for people all over the country in search of work. Welcome to the 21st-century boomtown.
[ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nor ... stainable/ ]

Change this drastic doesn’t come without its conflicts and complications, as director Jesse Moss found in Williston, a city in the western part of the state. Since 2008, workers have been streaming into the city, overwhelming its capacity to house them and testing the locals’ ability to be welcoming. The stand-out exception to the prevailing “us versus them” attitude is Pastor Jay Reinke, who fills his church — its pews, its hallways, its parking lot — with migrants.

Moss’s resulting documentary centers around Pastor Jay’s efforts to keep his makeshift community running, despite being nearly constantly at odds with the city council, the local newspaper and his neighbors. But it also spends time with the men who seek shelter under his roof, asking important and hard-to-answer questions about the promises that drew them to Williston in the first place, which more often than not seem to stand in stark contrast to how their lives there end up playing out. They come “to find living-wage work, but often just because they’re looking for purpose and meaning in their lives,” Moss told Salon. “They’re looking for redemption and salvation.”

“The Overnighters,” which premiered this year at Sundance, will be making its theatrical debut on Oct. 10.
[ http://www.jessemoss.com/The-Overnighters ]

Salon spoke with Moss about life in a city destabilized by the oil industry and the ambiguities of America’s energy explosion.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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[ http://www.salon.com/2014/09/27/the_roa ... your_town/ ]