Back in February I told you about Welcome to Leith, a planned documentary about the town of Leith, in North Dakota, a registered ghost town (yes, there’s a registry, presumably maintained by ghosts) where white supremacist Craig Cobb bought property with the hopes of attracting other white supremacists and taking over the town. Cobb, if you’ll remember, is this sort of racist The Joker character who achieved peak internet infamy last year when a DNA test showed him to be 14% Sub-Saharan African (the downfall of any racial ideology is that the boundaries between “races” are always pretty murky).
Now filmmakers Michael Nichols and Christopher Walker are back with a new trailer and Kickstarter campaign, trying to raise money to finish their doc. Here’s the update from Nichols:
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We finished our last major production shoot at the beginning of May – Cobb was released from jail and the town remains on edge, fearful of retribution. Though he’s not allowed within 500 feet of any of the victims, he still has followers online in the hate world that are fairly riled up. The film looks to have a fairly ominous ending. We spent several days filming him as he hid from the media upon his release.
We’re launching a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of raising funds so that we’ll be able to get a very solid rough cut together by the end of September to submit to festivals.
Well, I’m in. I’m sort of fascinated by the boom-and-bust cycle of towns in the great plains (partly covered in a book written by a friend of mine) even when neo-Nazis aren’t trying to take them over. Though the image of Craig Cobb planting his dopey flags around a crumbling barn on a dirt lake make a nice metaphor for the whole movement.