Ashley York

Sally Rubin

Silas House

Stacy Goldate

John Fee

Ben Caucci

Melanie Levy

Jon Matthews

Doug Blush

In this award-winning film, directors Ashley York (Tig) and Sally Rubin (Deep Down, Mama Has a Mustache) use a combination of personal narrative, regional history, and conversations with Appalachians ranging from York's grandmother to scholar bell hooks to challenge pervasive perceptions of Appalachia.

The film won a London Foreign Press Award as well as the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival and screened at DOC NYC and at the Heartland, Nashville, and Traverse City Film Festival where it won Michael Moore's Founders Award for Best Documentary. It is an Official Selection of the American Film Showcase.

The film was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the West Virginia Humanities Council, and filmed in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and California.

Los Angeles Film Festival

Traverse City Film Festival

Scruffy City Film & Music Festival

Oak Park Film Festival

The film is a far more sympathetic portrait than JD Vance's best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” taking a more descriptive than analytical approach.

Kevin Crust

The strongest, most clearly articulated section is the middle, in which York and Rubin theorize that the stereotype of the shiftless, lazy, mean, substance-addicted hillbilly has been embraced by forces who benefited from it economically and politically.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Hillbilly is forward-looking, believing there’s something special about its region-specific variety of what elsewhere would be called rednecks or bumpkins.