Kahane Corn Cooperman’s documentary captures a tiny Colorado mountain town where miners and theatre artists share the same main street.

There aren’t many places where miners and theatre artists live side by side. Then again, there aren’t many places like Creede, Colorado.

Perched at 8,800 feet in the southwest corner of the state and home to roughly 300 year-round residents, Creede is a former silver boomtown that reinvented itself in the 1960s when a repertory theatre company took root in the middle of the San Juan Mountains. That unlikely cultural hub, Creede Repertory Theatre, has attracted artists, audiences and new residents for decades, reshaping the identity and economy of a place better known for rugged practicality.

In Creede U.S.A., which screened on Nov. 4 at the Holiday Theater as part of the 48th Denver Film Festival, director Kahane Corn Cooperman presents Creede as a microcosm of contemporary America. The town is beautiful, contradictory and deeply divided yet bound together by proximity and shared history.

A town with two histories but one main street

Cooperman’s documentary is gorgeously shot, tenderly observed and quietly incisive in how it depicts the tensions of a town wrestling with change. The film begins by outlining the town’s history and establishing the “miners vs. artists” divide that locals frequently use to describe the area’s vibe.

Creede was the last silver-rush boomtown in Colorado, drawing thousands in the late 19th century with the promise of wealth carved from the mountainsides. When mining waned, the town needed something new. That answer arrived in a group of 12 University of Kansas students who collaborated with Creede’s chamber of commerce to build a repertory theatre in the town.

Since 1966, Creede Repertory Theatre has anchored summers in the town, bringing in tourists, seasonal residents and cultural capital. The result is an eclectic mix of ranchers, miners, theatre artists, retired outdoors enthusiasts, seasonal workers and young families who all share the same streets and few community institutions.

Cooperman quickly establishes that Creede is more than a charming oddity. The camera lingers on the storefronts and streets where contrasting histories and identities meet.

On one end of Main Street sits Mines & Memories, a cluttered storefront museum dedicated to the town’s mining legacy. Inside, shelves are packed with yellowing black-and-white photographs, geological maps, ore buckets and hardhats donated by families who have lived in Creede for generations. Later on, we will see the town’s annual Fourth of July Mining Contest, which turns rock drilling into a public spectacle. It is loud, dusty, celebratory and communal, a ritual that honors endurance and the physical labor that built the valley.

A month earlier on that same street, rainbow flags flutter during Creede’s Pride parade. Theatre artists and teens march alongside locals holding hand-painted posters; some spectators cheer from storefronts; visiting Rep actors wave to the crowd before heading to rehearsal. Pride, like the mining contest, is a community event that’s open, public and undeniably Creede.

The juxtaposition isn’t treated as ironic. Instead, Cooperman frames it as an ordinary fact of life in a place too small for subcultures to exist out of sight. Creede contains both, and no one can simply opt out of the other’s presence.

Creede Repertory Theatre has become as much a part of the town as mining.

When the public gets personal

It’s in that intertwined civic intimacy that the documentary finds its narrative and emotional core. The film follows Brittni and Lavour Addison, a biracial couple who moved from Jersey City so Brittni could become the education director at Creede Rep. They volunteer, make friends and invest deeply in the possibility of making a life here.

Brittni eventually runs for and wins a seat on the school board. That position places her at the heart of a contentious district-wide effort to update the health curriculum to include clearer, more inclusive language around gender and sexuality. Brittni supports the update. Opposing her are fellow board members Casey Adelman and Greg Pearson, who argue that such instruction should remain in the hands of parents, not classrooms.

What keeps these debates from becoming the familiar, flattened narrative of national polarization is Cooperman’s attention to relationships. Greg’s daughter, Waverly, is the closest friend of Lexy Mead, a nonbinary student whose experience animates the conversation. Their friendship remains steady even as their parents stand on opposite ends of an increasingly charged local issue.

Throughout the documentary, we get to know Lexy, who dreams of becoming an actor at Creede Rep and enjoys their rural life. Their parents, Dan Mead, a gruff country man who is afraid to confront others in town if they disrespect his child, and Kristeen Lopez, a fierce ally for Lexy who proudly wears rainbow-colored glasses, are loving, patient, and thoughtful as they navigate what it means to raise a queer child in a rural community.

Lexy and her family unquestionably represent a different vision of small-town independence. They are not framed as outsiders pushing against tradition but as neighbors of the same Creede fighting for their right to exist just like everyone else. Their presence in the community doesn’t erase the town’s history; it expands the definition of who belongs within it.

Even Greg, who is often positioned as the ideological opposite in the school board debates, is not framed as a villain. In one striking moment, Greg reveals that he was raised by two mothers, complicating any easy reading of his motivations. Greg, like the majority of the people in town, does not fit neatly into any ideological box. That, the film suggests, is precisely what makes Creede worth looking at closely.

It’s fitting that the eventual compromise the board reaches on the health plan we’ve watched them debate satisfies no one fully. The district adopts a curriculum that updates some new language but falls short of the fully inclusive policy Brittni had hoped for.

The decision feels neither triumphant nor tragic. It simply reflects the reality of a community that must keep living together the next morning.

How a community keeps going

Interestingly, the documentary captures the decision of Brittni and Lavour to leave after the school board fight. Their departure fulfills, in a way, the stereotype some longtime residents hold about the theatre community: that artists tend to pass through rather than stay.

But Cooperman refuses to render it as an ideological fallout or a failure of belonging. Instead, Brittni’s resignation from the school board becomes an occasion for a small gathering. Her colleagues, including Casey and Greg, bring cake. They sit together, talk, hug and send her off with warmth.

No one has changed sides. No one “won.” And yet, the kindness feels quietly radical. In an age when political disagreements frequently end friendships and rupture communities, Creede U.S.A. shows people who argue fiercely and still choose to sit across from each other afterward. The gesture is not sentimental; it is pragmatic, neighborly and human.

Cooperman does not suggest that this is easy or universally successful. There are bruises, but the film insists that what makes Creede notable is not harmony. It is persistence. The town continues because the people in it keep showing up for the town — and one another.

What makes Creede U.S.A. especially compelling is how patiently and rhythmically it unfolds. The film is structured around seasons, running from the start of Creede Rep’s 57th season in 2022 to the start of its 59^th season in 2024, allowing arguments and relationships to emerge, settle and re-emerge at the pace of real life rather than the tidy beats of documentary provocation.

Editor Andrew Saunderson interweaves conversations, B-roll from Creede Rep’s colorful productions, school board meetings, walks around town and moments of silence, allowing the landscape to speak when words fail. The film is not rushing to a point; it’s attentive to a place that moves at its own pace.

That patience makes the documentary’s larger argument feel earned rather than asserted. The film does not lecture. It simply watches a community trying to stay one.

The argument of Creede U.S.A. is never spoken aloud, but it’s unmistakable: Democracy depends on proximity, patience and the willingness to remain in conversation, especially when consensus is impossible. In Creede, politics is not abstract. It is the conversation you have with your neighbor, your child’s classmate’s parent and the person you see at the grocery store and again at the post office the next day.

This does not mean Creede is exempt from the fractures reshaping the rest of the country. Social media still emboldens people to say nasty things to one another, and national politics are still present, but unlike in Denver, or anywhere large enough to avoid those you disagree with, Creede offers few exit routes. You must live next to one another.

In a moment when many American communities respond to tension by withdrawing, Creede U.S.A. documents a place where coexistence remains unavoidable. And because of that, the work of understanding, begrudging tolerance and occasional grace remains ongoing.

Creede is not perfect. It is simply still trying, which, in 2025, feels like no small thing.