The American Southwest is a sweeping documentary journey down the Colorado River, narrated by activist and model Quannah Chasinghorse. Produced by Fin & Fur Films founder Ben Masters, in partnership with Natives Outdoors, the film blends intimate wildlife portraits of animals who live along the river—such as elk, beavers, condors, and jaguars—with an urgent story of a river under strain from dams, drought, and over-allocation.
Director, cinematographer, executive producer Ben Masters assembled a team of filmmakers with deep ties to the region, including director of photography Ryan Olinger and producer Dr. Len Necefer. Together, they built the dual narrative: tracing the river from its headwaters to the sea, while exploring humanity’s evolving relationship with water and wildlife. Indigenous leadership was essential from the start, with the Navajo Nation Film Office, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, and Native scholars helping to shape the story’s cultural foundation—perspectives amplified by Chasinghorse’s narration.
Masters is known for his feature documentary work: Deep in the Heart, SXSW 2019 award winner The River and The Wall, and Unbranded. He has built a career using cinema to inspire conservation, with his efforts making lasting differences in legislation and conservation initiatives. A love letter to landscapes and the species that populate them, The American Southwest calls on audiences to rethink water use before the Colorado River runs dry. Boxoffice Pro spoke with Masters about bringing his independent film exclusively to cinemas. The American Southwest screens in select theaters beginning September 5th.
We all know that manmade structures impede natural processes, but seeing that played out visually with the Colorado River is what makes film such a powerful medium to tell wildlife stories. What’s it been like to bring this story to an audience?
For years, I’ve known that the Colorado River goes dry. I feel like that’s such a sad state of our acceptance of the natural world. Sometimes the rivers are totally used [up] to where they no longer flow. It becomes this new baseline of ‘just the way it is.’ For me, this film really hit home how much water there is in the Southwest: there is so much water. The Colorado gets water from northern Wyoming, from up and down the Rockies, and from all of the Eastern slope of Utah’s Wasatch Range. It’s an unbelievably huge amount of water.
To see it go from its headwaters, where it has carved these beautiful canyons, giving life to all of these different salmon flies and trout, and then get totally used. It was a very impactful moment of my life: getting to the delta and coming to the realization that there’s so much water, but literally every single drop gets consumed by humanity before it reaches the sea. That just breaks my heart. The river should have water in it.
For those that don’t know what it takes to create a wildlife film, what does a shoot look like for you during production?
Each of the sequences that we filmed for The American Southwest—elk, trout, condor, salmon flies, rattlesnakes, jaguars, and petroglyphs—all of these different scenes. They were approached similarly in the sense that we needed to get between five and 10 minutes’ worth of sequence out of it, and that required getting a lot more than five or 10 minutes’ worth of footage. What is the story that is told within that scene, and how does that story relate to the greater story of the film—our society’s evolving relationship with the natural world? We approached each one of the scenes with the tools that we needed to get the job done and tried to budget enough time to do a good job of it so that the editors had the appropriate materials to cut together some really nice scenes.
For example, the jaguar scene took eight months of camera trapping. We went just south of the border for about two weeks looking for jaguar signs, meeting with different researchers, figuring out where they were, where the most likely position was to get shots, and then leaving these remote cameras there for six weeks at a time. Then going back in and checking the cameras, putting in new batteries. We were able to get about 25 minutes’ worth of jaguar footage that we then edited down into a seven-minute jaguar scene, which I’m extremely proud of. So some of the scenes were camera traps. Some of them were [filmed with] long lenses, like the elk. We just tried to sit on an elk for 30 days or so, getting up before daybreak and living with the elk all day for a month. Which is a great way to spend a month, by the way.
Your producer, Dr. Len Necefer, was instrumental in the Bears Ears National Monument sequence.
Len is the founder of Natives Outdoors, which is a production company based out of Tucson. They’re very active in the Southwest. They’ve got several cinematographers and photographers that are all indigenous and live in the area. I wanted to tell a petroglyph story in The American Southwest, but I’m a white guy from Amarillo. I was afraid of [either] not being able to do a good job of it or that it would be cultural appropriation to some degree. It was something that I wanted to do, but I just didn’t feel like it was my story to tell.
I was at a conference, and Len was giving a speech on how to incorporate native storylines into media. Len is a phenomenal public speaker. I met with him afterwards, and I was like, “Hey man, my name’s Ben. Here’s what I want to do, but I don’t want to mess it up. How do I do a good job of incorporating a native storyline?” And he’s like, “Just hire us.” [Laughs.] So I hired Len, and we partnered together.
He was a producer on the film, bringing a lot of his shooters from Natives Outdoors onto all the sets. He helped consult on a lot of the script, polishing and writing. He was a fantastic partner from the very beginning. I think that was probably the best partnership that we had from this whole thing. I learned so much. It was such a cool opportunity to get to work with him. Through Len, we were able to bring in Quannah Chasinghorse as the narrator of the film. I believe that she delivered one of the most beautiful narration performances of all time. It’s amazing.
Documentaries require some flexibility and room for discovery. Nature is obviously totally unscripted. How did what you discovered shape the story?
I had a vision for the movie before we began to shoot, but it was a story that I knew was going to evolve and shift. We did have a structure in the sense that we were going to follow two primary storylines. One being the course of water flowing down the Colorado River from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California, then down into Mexico and the Gulf of California.
The second storyline was always going to be our evolving relationship with nature and wildlife and water told over the past 250 years, starting with how Native peoples in the Southwest lived on the landscape through the current day, showing how dams and canals and diversions have altered the course of the river. It’s not a wild river; it’s a man-managed river now. We have the choice to manage it better, and that’s what the film advocates for.
When we talked about Deep in the Heart, you mentioned that each storyline required a different strategy for filming. What new or similar strategies did you implement here?
Deep in the Heart was a great primer for The American Southwest, in the sense that I discovered that it’s possible to tell social stories about us through the eyes of wildlife and landscapes. We definitely brought that into The American Southwest. With each of the different wildlife species that we focused on, we tell a story about us through that animal.
For example, the opening scene of the movie, where we see these beautiful elk and through Quannah’s narration learn that this amazing animal was nearly extirpated from the southwest to such an extent that there were only a few hundred left in the early 1900s. Because dedicated conservation hunters and dedicated environmentalists put together all of these different management plans and recovery efforts, we’ve been able to bring the species back from a couple hundred to where there’s now over half a million in the southwestern states.
It’s a huge, amazing conservation success story, and it speaks a lot to our ability as humans to manage wildlife and manage the landscapes for the benefit of both us and the wildlife ecosystem. That’s one of the things that really ties a lot of people together. As a nation, as a culture, there are a lot of divisions. I think everybody knows that, but I think the love of wild places and wildlife is something that really transcends political boundaries. The film does that in a way where it’s almost easier to talk about some of these social issues through the lens of wildlife than it is through human stories.
In advocating for wildlife and for conservation, what tangible impacts have you seen in your own career?
It always surprises me whenever we release a movie that actually makes a difference. With Deep in the Heart, I was hoping that we would have a positive impact, and I was, quite honestly, blown away by the degree of impact that it had. Deep in the Heart, which was my previous feature to The American Southwest, resulted in the first-ever conservation efforts for mountain lions in the state [of Texas], which I’m immensely proud of. It came down to a sequence that we had in the film where one of our main mountain lions stepped in a trap. It’s terrifying; a really harrowing sequence. Then we see a bear that has just chewed off its own leg [because it had been caught in a mountain lion trap.] It really changed mountain lion management in the state of Texas.
It also helped lead to ocelot recovery in the state. We were able to connect a couple of different agencies, as well as raise some funding for a couple of different organizations that are reintroducing ocelots. Since the film came out, there’s been a significant gift to build a new ocelot rewilding facility at [Texas A&M] University of Kingsville. There’s also been some branches that have signed up for places to reintroduce the cat. I’m extremely proud of that.
We did a screening at the [state] capitol and invited a lot of representatives and different policymakers and their staffers to it and had a great Q&A afterwards. Through that Q&A, I later learned that there was a Democrat and Republican that were both on the natural resources committee that got together and decided to create a $1 billion bond to create new state parks called Prop 14. It was a constitutional amendment that passed in 2023, which dedicated a billion dollars of state revenue, or state excess taxes, to create new state parks. Our movie helped inspire the creation of 300,000 acres of new state parks, which is awesome. There are a lot of other people that helped work on it too, but it was an impetus.
Growing up, were there experiences going to the movie theater that sparked your combination of film and wildlife?
Yeah, there have been a few really impactful movies. Looking back on my career, I think one of them was Racing Extinction, Louie Psihoyos’ film that was released in 2015. It was the first time I’d really considered our role as humans in the world from a really deep time perspective and how unfortunate it is that the rise of humanity has coincided with the extinction of so many species across the world.
That was a really impactful film for me, and then another that I really enjoyed that left a deep impact on me was [the series] Our Planet. That was the first time I’ve seen a blue chip natural wildlife history series that incorporated the human storyline into the animal sequences so seamlessly. That was really a large inspiration for Deep in the Heart, which then became an inspiration for The American Southwest. I highly suggest both that series and the film Racing Extinction.
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