SNOWLAND opens with a page from an enchanted scrapbook revealing our documentary participant, Cora Lee Witt, at age 14. As images on the pages come alive through imaginative stop-motion animation, we notice a family photo with one man, two women, and many children. The camera pans and we see Cora again, in a floor length dress, staring off into the distance to a drawing of a faraway castle. She says in voiceover, “I couldn’t understand why things were happening to me the way they were, so I turned in another direction to fill that hole. I tried my hardest to find the beauty in everything. That saved me.”

Now 68, Cora’s backstory unfolds as she candidly shares the intimate details of her life. She begins with her initiation into a polygamist marriage as a child bride in the secretive town of Short Creek in southern Utah where Cora became a second wife and an indentured servant. She had twelve children, and her sister-wife had nine. Her husband Richard was violent to Cora and the children, and sexually abused many of their daughters. When a friend encouraged her to speak to authorities outside the church about the abuse, Richard was sent to prison. But the community, threatened by Cora’s outspokenness, shunned her and evicted the family from their home onto the streets. This marked the juncture where Cora, in an effort to survive amidst so much hardship, began to retreat into a fantasyland of her own creation that she called Snowland.