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Trailer Watch: Hal Hartley’s My America
“What is my America?”
That was the question asked 50 playwrights by Centerstage, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Their answers were filmed by Hal Hartley, who is exclusively debuting the resulting feature documentary, My America, on Fandor for its SVOD premiere beginning July 4.
Filmed by Possible Films, led by award-winning director Hal Hartley, these 50 monologues by writers including Anna Deavere Smith, Neil LaBute, Christopher Durang, and Lynn Nottage explore our particular American moment—the ideas and people that make the country what it is today.
The responses, ranging from the political to the personal, form a tapestry of ideas. Scroll, search, or explore this snapshot of our nation through the eyes of its playwrights.
This feature version draws on twenty of those wildly disparate explorations. Their voices include a beauty pageant contestant who’ll never win a prize for brains; a U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan; a man talking about his crack-addicted sister, and another whose selling of “ten dollars of pot” led to a life in prison; a minster whose views on gays differ from his congregation; a crusty dowager worried about her coddled descendants; and a 1960s-bred free spirit still flying the freak flag decades later. There is room for an absurdist historical lesson as well as an entirely sung baseball anecdote. By turns angry, comic, political and poetical, MY AMERICA is a smorgasbord of distinctive character snapshots offering plenty of virtuoso acting and idiosyncratic style. – Dennis Harvey
Check out the trailer above.
