Documentary film features Miss Montana

MISSOULA – Return to Big Skies: Miss Montana to Normandy documentary film includes a bit of Seeley Lake history. The film directed and photographed by E. W. Ristau and produced by Geneva Ristau and Jenny Rohrer is now available on Amazon Prime for viewing.

The filming project started in late 2018 with a goal to chronicle the grassroots efforts of an aviation community comprised of mechanics, pilots, smokejumpers and everyday Montanans. The group worked in a hangar at the Museum of Mountain Flying to restore a World War II era C-47 and fly it to Europe in time for the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France in June 2019, E.W. Ristau said.

"Initially, we had been in talks with the museum about me flying with them over to Europe. We wanted to hire a crew to be on the ground in Europe and for me to be in the airplane with those guys," Ristau said. "The trip being a lot of the narrative of the film, due to insurance purposes and a number of other issues, it just didn't happen. Our filming ended when they left for Europe."

Ristau said the film sat on the shelf for a while after the aircraft left for Europe.

"I was not sure there was a story," Ristau said. "But when we started to look through the material and saw there was a story of a grassroots effort of average everyday citizens coming in and working on this immense project in a short time frame."

Filming was conducted in late 2018 into spring 2019 before the aircraft headed to Normandy, France. Over 200 volunteers worked day and night over the 10-month period to restore the aircraft, Ristau said. Crews had just six short hours of flight time before heading to Europe in 2019.

The narrative changed a bit to honor smokejumpers, veterans and Montana aviation history.

"We really started to see looking through all these interviews we conducted there was a great story," Ristau said. "We did shoot some follow up interviews, not really very many but essentially crafted the film out of what we had on hand."

The epilogue to the film includes footage shot by the crew who went to Europe, some footage from a high budget film crew that went over and some from people on the ground in Europe, Ristau said.

"It's a nice combination of history of aviation in western Montana," Rohrer said. "And, then the immediate story of all these hundreds of people coming together in the cold in this hangar that only got rudimentary heat later in the process to do all this work together."

Miss Montana C-47 was part of the Johnson Flying Service fleet. It was the plane that dropped the smokejumpers killed in the Mann Gulch tragedy.

"It was great to get John Maclean to tell the Mann Gulch story," Ristau said. "There couldn't have been a better person on earth to tell that chapter of the story."

The film was funded in part by a grant from the Montana History Foundation and fiscal sponsorship from the Big Sky Film institute. It was a selection of the 2022 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) AirVentures screening series.

A link to the film on Amazon Prime Video is available at MissMontanaMovie.com.