Documentary
The movie arose out of our sparetime as teenagers with fresh driver’s licenses and cobbled-together camera gear, wandering around a tired and honestly pretty grim post-industrial mill community, reinforced with after-hours access to the darkroom at the Sun Journal (where Aaron’s dad was the visuals editor), and some half-formed education in the techniques of Robert Frank, Frederick Wiseman, Dogme 95, Italian neorealism, pre-Obama Shepard Fairey, plus whatever culture pushed its way through the creaky pipes of low-bandwidth dial-up internet, or was smuggled up the actual superhighway of I-95 from Boston and eventually New York, or mailed first class via United States Postal Service from a burgeoning Netflix in those classic matte red envelopes, as valuable and rare as cash sent from China. [...] Somehow we negotiated access to a Canon XL1 3-CCD MiniDV camera and shotgun mic from the local public access station, in exchange for taping the high school graduation we didn’t participate in.
Directed by James N. Kienitz Wilkins, John Aaron Frank
