The driving force of Morrisa Maltz’s hybrid docu-drama The Unknown Country is a road trip: And it’s a journey that the writer-director knows very, very well.
It’s the 1,100 mile drive from North Dallas to Spearfish, South Dakota. She and her then-boyfriend, now husband, were living in Dallas: he was a paleontologist running a fossil gallery, while she was doing an art residency in Marfa, “so that’s how we ended up in Texas-ish,” she said. “Then I started doing a documentary in Oklahoma, then he started going up to South Dakota for dinosaur digs, and I started visiting him, driving those distances from Dallas while he was on those digs in South Dakota.”
However, it’s not Maltz in the driver’s seat for The Unknown Country. Instead, it’s Lily Gladstone as Tana, a woman from the Oglala Lakota Nation who has recently lost her grandmother and her sense of connection to her community, taking that long drive in this SXSW 2022-selected title.
“I want to make a movie about a young woman traveling alone. I don’t know what that is, I don’t know what that means, but I want to start there.” – Morrisa Maltz
When Maltz saw Gladstone in Certain Women, the idea for The Unknown Country was very bare-bones. “It’s still bare,” she laughed. “I was like, ‘I want to make a movie about a young woman traveling alone. I don’t know what that is, I don’t know what that means, but I want to start there.'”
She was not only inspired by her experiences road tripping, but by the people she met both on that 1,100 mile trip, and while killing time in Spearfish while her husband was on digs. “I was just wandering around, taking photos and meeting people,” many of whom ended up in the film. They were her collaborators, she said, who worked with her “on the shape and structure of this film, and what it could be.”
Possibly the most important connection she made was with Lainey Bearkiller, whose wedding ceremony serves as a center point to the film. Unsurprisingly, they met via a roundabout route: “I went to get my hair cut at a Costcutters in South Dakota by a Walmart, and the woman who cut my hair was her close friend. I didn’t know anybody, and she invited me out that night, and I met Lainey, and we became close friends.”
They inevitably discussed the idea of the film, and it was Bearkiller who suggested making the protagonist Indigenous: and having seen Gladstone in Certain Women, suddenly Maltz understood the story she was trying to tell. “I couldn’t picture what the film was until that combination of things.”
For Maltz, it wasn’t that she was a white woman telling a tale of an Indigenous woman, but rather that it was a collaborative process, built with her literal neighbor (Bearkiller and she live a couple of blocks apart in South Dakota), who resonated with Maltz’s core idea about being a woman feeling alienated from the wider world. “I wasn’t telling Lainey’s story,” Maltz said, “Lainey brought everything that she wanted to show to the film, and wanted to show these parts of her family, the positive familial situations that you don’t see in films, unfortunately.”
But it wasn’t simply about the real Lainey and the fictional Tana, but all the real people who appear in the film as themselves. “Dale’s story and Pam’s story, the waitress and motel owner and the gas station attendant, they showed what they wanted to show of themselves and built in their characters into the film. Otherwise, without all the people who wanted to be giving their stories, there wouldn’t be a film.”
“These films are such a family that I care about the people more than I do about the film. And truly the idea that we couldn’t all celebrate and be together, that was what was making my heart ache.” – Morrisa Maltz
The Unknown Country was also the first film to be given an interim agreement by SAG-AFTRA to allow the cast to promote the film. As Maltz noted, her micro-indie production is nothing like the major studios at the center of the ongoing actors’ strike. Moreover she felt it was important that they all – both the professional actors and those playing themselves – be part of its release. “We could have still had Lainey and the people who weren’t actors, but these films are such a family that I care about the people more than I do about the film. And truly the idea that we couldn’t all celebrate and be together, that was what was making my heart ache. With films that take this long and you pour everything in to them, if you can’t all be together to just hug each other, that was the sad part. So I’m really grateful that SAG saw this as a film to push through.”
The Unknown Country is in theatres now. Find our review and showtimes here.
This article appears in August 4 • 2023.