Billy Redden holding a photo of himself from the film Deliverance (Bryan Donnell/Holler Home Productions)

Hillbilly is an entertaining, informative, and sobering look at Appalachia: its diversity, the consequences of stereotyping of its people, and an examination of why so many there voted for and adored Donald Trump. It’s also a heartfelt love letter, but like actual love, there is heartbreak and some resentment. In other words, co-directors Ashley York, a native of the region, and Sally Rubin have made a complex film about complex people.

The documentary can be broken up into three different parts: the personal, the historical, and the cultural. York explains why she took on the project. She watched in horror as our current president, then only a candidate, courted the working-class people of Appalachia by promising coal jobs that, let’s face it, we all knew were not coming back. She saw her grandmother and uncle, stalwart Democrats, fall sway to Trump’s spell. She, being a progressive feminist documentarian, felt the only way she could process this choice was by going back and talking to her relatives.

She heads home after three years away and visits her relatives, all of whom are Trump fanatics. Their reasoning? He hasn’t seemed to have forgotten them. He doesn’t talk down to them, and York may have found the only footage of Trump speaking eloquently about the coal miners of Kentucky and West Virginia. Her relatives make it clear they are not fond of Trump’s racism and sexism. York’s nephew, who is probably just about voting age, would be happy to vote for a female president, if that female isn’t Hillary Clinton. But York makes it clear that Trump makes many people in that community feel recognized and valued in a way they haven’t before.

Using film clips, news reports, and interviews with various sociologists and writers, York makes the argument that the coal companies in the late 1800s deliberately depicted folks from the area as shiftless, lazy, and sexually deviant and dangerous so as to demonize them and exploit the land and labor with little consequence. Of course, they succeeded. The always-welcome poet-activist bell hooks points out that the stereotypes foisted on the Appalachian people are similar to those black people had to labor under since the nation began. It’s a deliberate and dehumanizing and done solely for the profit of others. York also shines a light on black Appalachians, who receive less media recognition and coverage nationally, though the depiction of black poverty elsewhere in the country is more prevalent.

Back in the 1970s and early ‘80s, national media focused on the area as one of the poorest in the country. Newscasters would come in, and their attempts at sympathetic portrayals of people in extreme poverty riled the pride of those living there. In one instance, York’s mother remembers being taken out of class in elementary school with the other children and led to the gym where there were piles upon piles of donated shoes. The children were told to pick the shoes they wanted, even though most of them could afford shoes and, according to her mother, “Most of them were pretty ugly.”

York also tracks down Billy Redden, who played the young banjo player in the 1972 film Deliverance at the tender age of 14. He was paid $400 for the role and now works at Walmart. He has spent decades reckoning with a stereotype that he was too young to realize he was perpetrating. Redden’s dream is to go to Los Angeles, though he’s pretty sure that’s not going to happen.

Finally, York dives deep into the progressive subculture that occupies the same space as the Trump worshipping coal mining families. They are articulate, poignant, and fiercely proud of their heritage and the history of the region. One of the subjects is Silas House, a successful writer and defender of hillbilly culture and the region from whence it’s sprang and who also happens to be gay. He spends a good amount of time explaining his reasons for staying and how important roots and how misunderstood his people are. And then Donald Trump wins, and it’s a difficult thing for him to reckon with. Possibly the most heartbreaking moment of the film is watching Silas and his husband work through this.

In the end, there is a message of hope and understanding and perseverance. Hillbilly is hopeful, but you claw through a lot of sadness at the treatment of Appalachians from both liberals and conservatives to get there.