What is the ‘Real Yellowstone?’ New Film Aims to Find Out

When ranchers and wildlife advocates clash, they often communicate through lawsuits or lobbyists. Tom Opre wants them to talk through his camera.

After award-winning video dives into safari hunting in Zimbabwe and the Highland hunting traditions of Scotland, Opre looked over his own backyard with the upcoming Real Yellowstone. The film, which debuts in Bozeman on July 11, considers the interlocking challenges of raising crops and livestock on the same landscape that attracts elk, buffalo, hunters and tourists.

“The majority of humans now live in cities, and they don’t realize the decisions they make have impacts in places like Montana,” said Opre, who makes his main living as a commercial videographer from his home in Kalispell.“What this film will do is make people sit down and realize they’re a lot closer to the land than they think. Here in Montana, I hope this film will cause people to sit down and have these conversations.”

Those discussions circle around issues raised by TV shows such as Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone, not BBC Earth’s Yellowstone National Park. Opre’s not looking at sexy soap-opera cowboys fly-fishing on horseback. He is examining what happens when trophy properties abut working ranches, when big game populations compete with domestic livestock, and when rewilding campaigns unsettle precarious local economies.

“There are all kinds of examples where we muck things up,” Opre said. “We need to be better neighbors and stewards of the land. And we’ve got to make sure the majority of people understand that when we make decisions, they do have downstream effects. I wanted to give a voice to rural people who are living with these wildlife on their lands.”

Real Yellowstone steps into some prickly pear patches like the clash between American Prairie’s bison restoration project along the Missouri Breaks and the property rights group Save the Cowboy. It compares the economics of sustaining a world-famous trophy elk hunting destination with trying to raise alfalfa crops raided by those same elk.  

Nationwide, outdoor recreation, including hunting, generated $1.2 trillion of economic output in 2023, according to Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics. Subtracting the costs of labor and supplies, that works out to $640 billion added to the United States’ gross domestic product.

On a national level, that value-added amount was two times greater than agriculture and forestry ($274 billion), and one and a half times that of oil and gas development and mining ($412 billion).

But at the state level, recreation and agriculture are close contenders in Greater Yellowstone. Montana ranked No. 3 for the income that outdoor recreation contributed to its state economy, behind only Hawaii and Vermont. The Treasure State generated 31,000 jobs and $1.6 billion in wages, making up almost 5 percent of the state’s GDP. Meanwhile, agriculture contributed 3.2 percent.

Wyoming ranked fifth on the outdoor recreation list, with about 16,000 jobs bringing in $800 million in wages and 4.1 percent of state GDP. That compared to 1.6 percent from agriculture. Idaho had more jobs (37,000) and wages ($1.8 billion) than its GYE neighbors, but its more diversified economy pushed outdoor recreation’s share down to 3.3 percent of state GDP. Idaho potatoes and other foods made up 4.3 percent of its GDP.

So the battle for bragging rights about who most benefits the Greater Yellowstone economy weaves between outfitters and implement dealers, stockyards and campgrounds. Although the cultural references changed, Opre found similar conflicts between African big-game hunters and pastoral herders, and between Scottish rewilding conservation groups and the gamekeepers and gillies hunting red deer and grouse.

The debates quickly get heated, regardless of continent. All parties make claims to tradition, historical practice, ways of life, livelihoods, and the best interests of the plants and animals they champion. And all feel the threat of change. At one point in his film The Last Keeper, Opre describes the destabilizing of Scottish Highland hunting communities as “a cultural genocide in slow motion.”

Opre said he expects to draw fire from all sides, whether he’s digging into the gory details of how meat moves from the hoof to the plate or he’s exposing the secret scenic wonders that locals hope tourists never discover. A lifelong hunter, he likes to recount the pivotal historical role that trophy hunters like Theodore Roosevelt played in rescuing North America’s big game populations from 19^th-century market hunting.

That’s the secret sauce that tends to produce effective projects, according to Julia Sherman, executive director of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

“What makes a good documentary is a film that makes you feel something and hopefully starts some conversation,” said Sherman, who has not seen Real Yellowstone. “You want something nuanced enough to bring all sides of the picture into that conversation.”

It’s always a challenge in what Sherman called “an inherently biased form of media.” Documentarians must have a clear motive in making a film they can explain to funders and participants. The trick, Sherman said, is transparency.

“Knowing what the motives are and who made the film — who is behind the lens — is just as important as understanding the content of the film,” she said. “Then as a viewer, you’re forced to make up your own mind.”

The Big Sky festival in Missoula, Montana screens dozens of films, usually organized into thematic strands such as “stranger than fiction,” “creative world” and “archival.” A documentary like Real Yellowstone, she guessed, could end up in either a “natural world” or “politics/civics” strand — both popular with audiences. Films about food have also been crowd-drawers, she said.

“Asking the questions ‘where does food come from?’ and ‘how are animals treated?’ tend to have more visceral reactions in the audience,” Sherman said. “But you have to be careful. It can be gratuitous. People shut off when things are too brutal.”

While Opre doesn’t shy away from the bloody aspects of hunting, he also wants to pull the conversation away from what he considers the 5 percent of the hunting community that dominate its public perception.

“Ninety-five percent of what I see on outdoor television shouldn’t be on television,” Opre said. “When you post a picture of your dead animal on a public forum, most people have no frame of reference. They don’t know whether it’s a zoo animal or you spent all this money to hunt the animal in Asia. And for some people, the hunters don’t look like anything different than an Isis terrorist who just cut the head off a human when the war was going on. They don’t see the difference.”

And yet, Opre found hunters who not only weren’t concerned about the public perception of their sport, they didn’t bother to vote or participate on public decisions that affect landscape and wildlife management.

“There’s this disconnect in urbanized Western society,” he said. “Since the Great Depression, there’s been a steady movement away from the land to cities. Before that, most people had a connection with a family member or friend who had a ranch or farm. They knew where food came from, and its impacts on the land. In todays’ society, we’ve outsourced our production and our killing of animals.”

Opre’s previous films won numerous awards, and The Last Keeper  was screened before the Scottish Parliament. He hopes for similar exposure with Real Yellowstone, including a multi-theater tour across Montana this summer and a showing at the Western Caucus foundation meeting in Whitefish hosted by Montana Representative Ryan Zinke in August.

“I hope we get this in front of decision makers, and in front of the public,” he said. “It gets people talking.”

Real Yellowstone will hold its World Premiere at the Crawford Theater in Bozeman, Montana’s Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture at 7 p.m. MST. A panel discussion will follow at 8:30 p.m. Visit Shepherds of Wildlife Society for ticket information and to watch the film trailer.