by Abe Friedtanzer
Married filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine are no strangers to the Sundance Film Festival, premiering both Boys State and Girls State in Park City. They also made the documentary The Mission, about missionary John Allen Chau, who is the subject of a narrative film, Last Days, screening this year at Sundance. Moss and McBaine return to a field they know well - education - with a look back at a group of trailblazing student journalists and environmental advocates prepared to take on government systems and the mafia before they even graduated high school...
In Middletown, New York in the 1990s, Fred Isseks decided he wanted to make things a little more interesting for his high school students. Rather than teach a conventional course grounded in literature, he offered Electronic English, where students would learn how to use video cameras and to craft stories with more than just pens and paper. He took them to the nearby landfill, where they discovered that there was plenty of concerning damage that might threaten their local water supply and public health, and from there, they ran with the story, pushing for years to get local representatives and state officials to do something about it.
It’s remarkable just how much footage from Isaaks’ classrooms thirty years ago still exists. That serves as the basis for this film, with undeniable recordings of the area around the landfill that would shake anyone watching to their core and other filmed conversations with public figures, including the editor of the local newspaper, who comes in to condescendingly tell the students that there was likely no story where they were looking. We have a saying in journalism, he says: if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. While that may speak to corporate practices, it’s far less educational or productive than all of what Isseks has taught his students.
In addition to plentiful archive footage that essentially tells this story on its own, Moss and McBaine also have access to Isseks himself, who isn’t quite as enthusiastic or dynamic as he is dressed in nineties garb and pushing back against the system, but at seventy-five years old still has a great deal of visible passion and pride for the work he’s done. There are also several students, a few of whom have gone on to become cinematographers and directors, who reflect back on the cringeworthy nature of some of their juvenile behavior on-camera but otherwise fondly recall the intrepid nature of their young crusade in present-day interviews.
As with many instances of advocacy over a long period, the creation of a film like this means that the problem wasn’t completely resolved and that, unsurprisingly, government arms didn’t move swiftly to rectify this dangerous public issue. But there’s still reason to celebrate, namely in the way that this group helped lead to a reckoning with the mob and ensured that this was a conversation happening on the national stage. Moss and McBaine once again deliver a compelling film that smartly lets its subjects do all of the talking, conveying their worldview and their fervent desire to document and publicize the story, whatever it may be.
Middletown makes its world premiere in the Premieres section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.