Private · Not for Distribution
Songs of the Ancient Forest
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Black Ram is a proposed timber sale in the Kootenai National Forest around the Yaak Valley — old growth, grizzly habitat, three centuries in the making, and the center of a long fight over what's lost when an ancient forest is treated as timber.
Near the edge of the proposed logging area, a 315-year-old spruce came down in a windstorm after centuries of standing watch over one of the most biologically rich landscapes in the Northern Rockies. Writer Rick Bass and collaborators carried a section of the tight-grained wood out of the forest by hand.
Jeff Bridges worked with a team of designers and luthiers to build the Black Ram Guitar from that wood — then brought it back to the forest in Montana and played it on the very stump the tree fell from.
Artists and musicians teach the instrument new songs, and those songs return attention to the forest that made them possible. It's the film's clean, quiet spine: the forest grows for three centuries, a piece of it is carried out by hand, and art gives it a voice far beyond Montana.
We've spent the last two years on the ground with Rick Bass — the Yaak Valley Forest Council's co-founder, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the writer who's led this fight for nearly three decades — documenting the guitar, the musicians it's brought together, and the forest it came from.
Federal proposals could roll back the Roadless Rule — the policy that has protected inventoried roadless areas nationwide for over twenty years — and national parks and public lands are under new pressure everywhere. Hope isn't naive right now. It's necessary.
This film is half shot. Now more than ever, we need to be funded and ready to move — to get a crew into the field and document what's happening to our wild places while it's happening, not after. Every dollar gets us closer to finishing it.
The film is halfway shot. The next two years may be the hardest stretch yet for wild places like this — funding right now goes toward four things.
Crew days and travel to complete a film that's currently only half shot.
Get a crew into the Yaak on short notice to record any logging or damage as it happens.
Travel and session costs to bring the Black Ram guitar to more musicians.
Commission T Bone Burnett to write and produce a signature piece of music for the film.
A single crew trip. One more musician's session. A piece of the commission. Write to us and we'll walk you through where the film stands and how to give.
Get in TouchThis is a living campaign, not just a film. Beyond funding, here's where else to plug in.
Play the guitar, write a song, contribute art inspired by the Yaak — join the growing group of artists lending their talent to this fight.
We're looking for producers, editors, audio engineers, camera operators, still photographers, and writers willing to help finish this film.