Set amid the wilds of North Dakota, Leith is remote in a way that feels almost archaic: a sleepy cluster of clapboard and dirt roads. As towns go, they scarcely get more secluded. So when a man named Craig Cobb moved there in 2012, his neighbours assumed that he was looking for a quiet way of life. But as he began to buy up plots of land in the area, his true intentions became apparent.It’s a story so eerily dreadful that it seems ripped from the pages of a novel. Far from an innocuous recluse, Cobb revealed himself as a white supremacist with plans to sell on the plots to sympathisers, thereby establishing an electoral majority of white nationalists in the town. When one such sympathiser heeded the call, and moved his family there, film-makers Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker booked flights and brought their cameras to town.What was initially intended as a short film became the full-length feature, a troubling account of the hatred that Cobb brought with him and the community’s attempt to rebuke his toxic ideas. We caught up with Michael and Christopher to discuss their experience of this most tense of environments, and a place they recall as otherworldly in feel:This is part of what makes the documentary so compelling; the way the camera lingers on landscapes, perfectly alert to the desolate beauty of Leith’s Grant County environs, and the trauma contained within them. As a portrait of a town in turmoil,is also helped by the small scale of its subject matter, and the candour of the town’s citizens. As Christopher recalls,There’s no sense that anyone is holding back; Leith’s terror does not bubble away below surface.By the time the pair could talk to Cobb, he was in jail, having been arrested on three counts of terrorizing. But Christopher says that he too was forthcoming:’ Yet while Cobb might have been willing to speak, neither filmmaker could identify quite how nor why he became the man he did:is a study of a small town, but one which reverberates with the noise of wider-reaching problems. When we ask about the extent of white supremacism in America, Christopher responds ‘I definitely thinkIt’s clear that these are filmmakers who are interested in context.The pair argue that this is a problem which has been transformed by the internet, with white supremacist websites like Stormfront providing. But they’re keen to emphasise the complexity of the situation, recognising thatThe film also raises the ever-present issue of gun control, albeit indirectly. Part of what makes the situation in Leith feel so dangerous is the fact that not only are Cobb and his followers armed but so too are the townsfolk. It’s all too easy to see how this could escalate. Intriguingly, though, this concern is never made explicit; ‘.’There’s little doubt thattells an unusual story: a kind of claustrophobic horror. But what’s so disturbing and indeed so powerful about the film is the way in which it speaks to problems beyond the bounds of Grant County.