Jeremiah Johnson

An American soldier flees west to escape the Mexican War and becomes a 'mountain man'. He meets an old trapper, who teaches him how to survive in the wilderness,

After being forced to violate an Indian burial ground, main character Jeremiah Johnson loses his new Indian wife and their adopted child in a vendetta between him and an Indian tribe, destroying his idyllic life as a trapper and forcing him to become a legendary Indian killer at the expense of his original ideals.

With spectacular landscape images shot on location in Utah, the film captures both the benefits and challenges of living in the wilderness that Jeremiah chooses over civilization. In a rather unglamorous way, director Sydney Pollack, starring Robert Redford, tells a story that questions both white colonialism while also questioning the myth of the man of nature. The film was one of the biggest when it was released in 1972 and some interpret it as a description of the sentiment in the US after the Vietnam War that condemned civilization for destroying the wilderness and preventing individuals from living a peaceful life in it. An issue that is perhaps as relevant today as it was then, but for different reasons this time.