In the first few frames of the 2021 documentary “Pure Grit,” director Kim Bartley follows a young Shoshone horse racing champion named Sharmaine as she hikes into the “no man’s land” of the Wyoming wilderness to hunt elk at dawn. Life in the Wind River Basin, viewers soon learn, is not for the faint of heart. Sharmaine tracks and shoots a doe, slings the bloody carcass over her back, and tells the viewer: “In life you have to work for everything just to get what you want.”

Movies always deal in imitation, relief, and myth; filmmakers cannot hope to capture the whole reality of their subjects so they create a patchwork quilt stitched together by a team of location scouts, set designers, and wardrobe stylists. Filmmakers frequently apply this cinematic reimagining to universities. Movies like “Good Will Hunting,” “Legally Blonde,” and “The Social Network” combine footage shot at multiple schools with the visual conventions of Boston’s Ivy League university to build a composite Harvard as a setting. This synthesized Harvard does not have to be true to form; it just has to feel right for the viewer with characters who convey an aura of academic self-importance set to a background of New England red brick.