Winter's Bone and Justified; 'Country Noir', the rural criminality genre
This movie and the excellent TV Series Justified are kindred in spirit and they're both great. They form a very rare genre of rural crime movies I think, I can't name that many of the top of my head (Iowa, The Lookout, Fargo, and that's it) Can anyone think of movies or TV shows that are similar?
I really like that atmosphere it makes me think of where my family comes from (the "Montagne Noire" i.e. Black Mountain in the South West of France) a hills and valleys rural area where after WWII a lot of the Maquisards (Resistance fighters that lived in the forest, and survived through stealing and black market) kept their outlaw lifestyle even long after the krauts were gone (stealing farming and masonry equipment, gas and diesel trafficking, smuggling Andorran smokes and booze). Add the fact that everybody there has guns, like in a lot of rural areas everywhere in countries without a big gun problem like the US, you have more guns in the countryside than in the towns, save the really bad neighborhoods.
And now they have a big growing drug problem with the Free Parties scene (Techno parties in the middle of nowhere so the cops can't find them, so backwoods areas became flooded with city kids and their drugs), the proximity of Toulouse and Béziers (very criminal cities, the latter being my hometown and is the capital of bad quality heroin named after the town) and Spain's enormous heroin and cocaine trades, so you have little towns lost in the forest like Revel with more than half of their youth on drugs. The only blessing is that meth hasn't really took off in France, there is some but not that much and the labs are in Russia or something.
And you can bet your a$$ that that clanic, blood-feudy and gossipy crap is there, with people watching each other all the time, any swinging d1ck you cross path with knows exactly who you are and who is your family (if he's not family himself), you have neighbors dispute that date from a century ago, people who snitch hidden pot grow-ops to the cops just because they don't like your family and an ever present number of "hunting accidents". My people (the occitans) in all their splendor.
All that to say that I can empathize more with that kind of stories than being a cop in the NYPD for example, so if you know crime movies located in places as such (Kentucky, Appalachians, Ozarks, etc., and even outside the USA, rural Britain is interesting too - if you haven't seen Dead Man's Shoes I urge you to do it) please post them, and thank you.