New Rural Cinema: Landscape, Community and Poverty in Recent US Indie Films

In the past decade, spanning from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, rural poverty in the United States has risen dramatically. The impact of the pandemic is set to intensify these inequalities as the decades of neoliberal dismantling of public healthcare and other social institutions leave inhabitants of impoverished rural areas particularly vulnerable.
Even before this current exacerbation, representations of rural landscape in American ci...