Film celebrates a 'Girl From God's Country'

Nell Shipman — silent film writer, director and star — came to Idaho’s Priest Lake from Hollywood in 1922 with her 10-year-old son, her ill-fated lover-producer, a future Academy Award-winning cinematographer (Joseph Walker) and a personal zoo of 70 animal actors that included bobcats, bears, elk, eagles, deer and sled dogs. She was the first of her kind: a female independent filmmaker who refuted Hollywood’s mistreatment of animals and refused the assured trappings of a studio contract to instead produce her own films on location in the Idaho wilderness.