This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America

"We were in search of adventure.
A place we could own land and start a family.
The Millennial dream."
This Country is a beautifully illustrated story of two artists—a documentary filmmaker and a teacher/cartoonist—who buy six acres of land in remote, central Idaho after being priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Instantly, I felt immersed in Navied Mahdavian's new life, where he and his wife are determined to be self-sufficient homesteaders living in a 280-square-foot cabin. The two start out charmingly inexperienced with rural living and hardships, such as weather, which becomes most apparent during their first winter, when they must rely on the helpfulness of neighborly strangers. Unfortunately, as Mahdavian and his wife make great strides toward establishing their home in this place—by reopening a local movie theatre, planting an impressive garden, and conceiving a child—the local culture challenges them with its own traditional ideas of what an American is and should be.