Local amateur documentarian looking to continue work on COVID-19

Havre resident Clayton Quinnell published a self-made documentary on the effects of COVID-19 on the Hi-Line in December of last year and is now making a follow-up.

The documentary “COVID on the Hi-Line” can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwZ7hioiI and features interviews with local public officials and residents about COVID-19 and how it’s affected them and the area after taking viewers through the opening months of the pandemic using a compilation of news clips.

Quinnell, a recently-retired former business owner, said while the documentary seeks to examine the effect the pandemic has had on the community, the primary motivator behind making it was the desire to combat misinformation he found through social media.

“People would receive bad information on Facebook and they would spout it out as fact,” he said. “... People didn’t see through the mud and know what was fact, so I went around, just locally, did research online and showed the impact it had on our community.”

He said misinformation persists in the minds of some through deliberate misunderstanding, but a substantial number of people are misinformed by people they trust.

Quinnell said he has a friend in Billings who was among them, having listened to his co-workers who said things about masks and vaccines that just weren’t true and he trusted them because he thinks they’re intelligent and he didn’t think or want to disbelieve them.

“The scary thing is that there are very intelligent people who are choosing to believe this stuff, and people who know they’re intelligent say to themselves, ‘Well if X person says that this is true, I mean he’s a smart guy, it’s gotta be true,’” Quinnell said.

Quinnell said, despite the seemingly omnipresent nature of the pandemic, it was genuinely difficult to find people who wanted to talk openly about it and he’s still looking for participants for part 2 which he’s hoping to finish the interviews for by the end of this month.

Part 1 of the documentary features interviews with Havre Mayor Tim Solomon, Havre Chief of Police Gabe Matosich, First Lutheran Church Pastor Megan Hoewisch and Boys & Girls Club of the Hi-Line Club Director Tim Brurud, but Quinnell said the most interesting interview was with his long-time friend and Atkinson Music Owner Mike Atkinson.

He said he and Atkinson are, at least politically, polar opposites with Atkinson skewing right and him left, but they’ve always managed to hold healthy dialogue on issues like this.

Quinnell said all the interviewees from part 1 will come back in part 2 with the exception of Solomon and Matosich, but he’s still looking for more participants.

He said the original documentary was not meant to be a vehicle for his own opinion, but it did end up functioning as a bit of a PSA to remind people to take the pandemic seriously.

However, he said, part 2 will see him expressing his own perspective along with interviewees.

Quinnell said despite including his own opinions he aims to represent all participants and their opinions fairly even if they are diametrically opposed to his.

He said he intends to use similar interview style to part 1, which for the most part only edited out stutters and pauses in order avoid painting interview subjects in any particular light.

Quinnell said the main two questions he’s going to ask participants are what they think of the pandemic and what they’ve learned from it.

“I want to know what people learned about themselves, I want to know what people learned about their community because of the pandemic,” he said.

He said he’s not overly worried about legitimizing perspectives born of misinformation in the documentary because social media has more or less already done that and he doesn’t think his documentary is capable of doing damage in that respect.

However, Quinnell said, like part 1, he doesn’t intend to allow comments on the video for fear that it will turn into toxic breeding-ground of misinformation that would be impossible for one person to moderate effectively.

As for him, Quinnell said, the pandemic has inspired a certain level of cynicism regarding how divisive things like masks have become, though he said this is certainly not exclusive to Havre or the Hi-Line.

“Overwhelmingly, I have a deep disappointment in my fellow man when it comes down to it,” he said.

He said while he’s never had COVID-19, the pandemic has affected him significantly, with five people he knows having contracted it and two of them dying.

He said one had a number of underlying conditions that made her passing tragic but not surprising, the second, however, was entirely out of left field and was a real shock to his system.

“You do have people out there that say this is all scare tactics from the government, and then you have the people who have experienced it first-hand,” he said. “I lost two people to it.”

He said he’s also been disappointed in law enforcement for what he believes is a consistent unwillingness to back up the county in their efforts to make the community safer, especially during the latter part of last year when things were at their worst.

Quinnell said he thinks the Hill County Health Department has done an admirable job trying to combat the spread of COVID-19, but when it came to masks and trying to get irresponsibly run businesses to comply with safety guidelines law enforcement was needlessly resistant.

However, he said, he’s also been impressed by the many businesses in town that went above and beyond to adapt and make their establishments safe, not just out of self-interest but out of moral obligation.

As for the current situation in the area, he said, he worries that vaccine hesitancy and the persistence of misinformation will prevent the eradication of the disease, and it will become another vaccine people need to get every year or two.

Despite his own strong personal opinions, he said, his aim with part 2 is not to humiliate, irritate or judge people who don’t agree with him.

“I’m not looking to upset people, I’m just trying to get a good litmus test out there of what people believe,” he said.

Quinnell said doing personal projects like this, sometimes with the help of his children, has been a rewarding use of his ample free time.

He said despite everything that’s happened and his aforementioned disappointments, he still proud of and loves his hometown and his community which is part of what drives him to continue this project.