An engaging documentary about merit and mechanics in their own form, ”Middletown“Located deep in the Slacker -an 1991, when in a small town in Upstate New York, a Vanguarding High School teacher monitors a student project that reveals a local government conspiracy. Built mostly of camcorder archive films from an audiovisual class in Middletown High School, this often wins, sometimes Rodless film Follows students as they work together to examine toxic waste dumped in a nearby landfill. Even worse was the landfill located on top of a large regional aquifer, which indicates that much of the district’s drinking water was damaged harmlessly.
The documentary was directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, filmmaking the duo behind the popular documentary Mini-Franchise “Boys State” (2020) and “Girls State” (2024). But the observation method for these films is supplemented here by a mountain of immobile archived camcorders originally captured by the former Middletown students. McBaine and Moss anchor the grainy diaries with some reintroduced sequences, as well as talking main interviews with the now-grown classmates.
The hero of “Middletown” is Fred Issks, a warm but idiosyncratic high school teacher who, in the early 1990s, was granted permission from the school to imagine an audiovisual course. He named the electronic English. The class, shows the movie, was an experimental free for everyone. The students learned to use equipment on the move while shooting provisional rap music videos or turned their lenses on friends as they walked around.
Because of its looseness, the course became a sanctuary for unfocused or meaningless teens. Issks even directed some of the more sought -after specifically and suggested that they register. It was the rare teenage site where everyone from Shirkers to the Jocks to the Entertainment Seekers could sunbathe in the promise of a new technology. Some of Issek’s more committed students even became acolys of a kind and signed up for as many courses as he offered and stood at him while the other teachers rolled his eyes on his discoveries.
These were the children who ended up on a special Issek’s mission: the investigation of the local landfill. In a contemporary interview with Issks, we learn that he was tipped to the toxic waste dumping at that time by a farmer, who agreed to be interviewed by Issks and his class for a random student documentary. The subsequent project, all participants admits, was no Laura Poitras Joint. Even Issks was trained only as an English teacher, and although he tries to put on his investigative journalist hat on several occasions, his skills at best are rudimentary. But when he gave the children a space to develop their curiosity and investigative spirit, Issek’s something valuable: he helped them care about the world around them and appreciate their ability to shape it for the better.
Charismatic male mentors are a cinematic holy cow, and there is a banality in hearing Issek’s former underlings Högen unconditional praise for him. More engaging is the arch with archival material, especially those clips that have Issks that school their students in the documentary form. In what was once mainly selection films, we see the teacher and classmates who begin to report excursions where Issek’s gently remind students to capture the establishment of images, zoom in on evidence or compose certain shots for maximum effect. There is a Brekish type of satisfaction with watching Issks discuss cinematic vocabulary within a documentary that uses that particular language.
“Middletown” loses steam about three quarters of the way through its driving time, when the invisible disclosure-if you can call thirty-year-old news a reveal-known as an anti-climax against history’s large schedule. But maybe McBaine and Moss framed the events in this way consciously. At the end of the day, this is a story about inspiration and individual growth, with the landfill exposure that is simply the formative experience through which these once diffident children could bloom.
McBaine and Moss try to lean into the failure by showing how, even after the students’ revelation became short -lived national news, there is nothing for the group to do anything other than graduation from high school and continue with their rest of their lives. But if previous segments of “Middletown” suggest that we are building into something revealing, the latter half feels a bit like a train chewing on aimless after passing its destination. It’s a nice trip. It only lacks a small edge.
Rating: B.
“Middletown” premiered at 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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