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“We Broke a Cardinal Rule of Documentary Filmmaking” | Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, Middletown

A young man wears a purple t-shirt, green bucket hat and sports a goatee. He holds a microphone and stands in front of barrels of indiscriminate waste.Middletown, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why?

The one day that stands out, and will forever, from the production of our film Middletown, is the summer day when we travelled upstate to meet our subject Fred Isseks, for the first time, at his home in Middletown, New York.

Fred is a former high school teacher. Our documentary is about a ground-breaking investigation that Fred and his students conducted in the early 1990s that uncovered an elaborate conspiracy that was poisoning their community. What made the class project extraordinary is the students made a documentary about their investigation, called Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed. Fred had miraculously saved everything—all the footage and outtakes from their multi-year project. And our hope was to build our story from these scenes and fragments, and invite Fred and his star students to revisit this transformative experience 30 years later.

We broke a cardinal rule of documentary filmmaking for us which is to ALWAYS visit a subject with a camera in hand. But it felt important to leave the camera behind and just spend some time getting to know Fred. We spent the morning with Fred and his wife Denise over a delicious brunch that Denise had prepared, talking about the film we hoped to make and why the story excited us. Amanda and I are about the same age as Fred’s former students and also first picked up a camera in those heady days of the early ‘90s, when the camcorder was suddenly more available to everyone, including aspiring filmmakers.

After brunch, we sat outside under a large tree in Fred’s front yard. He has an easy charm, and is quick to laugh, but also spoke in inspiring and powerful ways about the investigation and why it remains a current and vital story, not just for Fred and his former students, but for all of us. We quickly understood what made Fred a terrific teacher and why he would be a great film subject. We left Middletown that day moved and inspired by Fred and his incredible project and determination to tell this story. It was a reminder that there are always moments in a relationship with a film subject where it’s important to put the camera down, or leave it behind.

See all responses to our annual Sundance Question here.

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