AFS Doc Days '25: Middletown

With a present so fraught with tension as ours, it’s no wonder so much of our entertainment takes place at least a few decades in the past. There’s a funny tendency to romanticize prior eras; weren’t things always simpler back then? For many of us, the pang of nostalgia is especially tender for the 1990s. One reason for this particular decade is because it was the youth of millennials and gen X (and, of course, pre-9/11): whether you were a small child eating red dye 40 and watching Rugrats or a teenager working at an incredibly vibey Taco Bell, you likely have some association between the 90s and unburdened joy. This psychological tie is often leveraged in a tactic known as “nostalgia bait,” where a piece of media might rely on the power of nostalgia to carry an otherwise unremarkable film or series. But let us consider the etymology: the Greek words nostos (return home) and algos (pain). Beyond sentimentalism, true nostalgia is invoked when there is also the pain of understanding that the thing you miss is something you will never have again. 

Regardless of your relationship with the 90s, you will feel nostalgic for your own youth while watching Middletown, the third directorial collaboration between spouses Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, following the lauded Boys State (2020) and Girls State (2024). Like its predecessors, Middletown shows the undaunted ambition of youth who wish to change the world. However, unlike in the simulated worlds of the Boys and Girls State programs, the students of Middletown High School are confronting very real community problems and clashing with actual government officials. For close to a decade, teacher Fred Isseks gave his “Electronic English” students a hands-on education in journalism by guiding them through an investigation into the corrupt world of local politics and waste management. Their project, a documentary titled Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, is one of the threads in the Middletown tapestry; much of the film’s footage is short firsthand by those teenagers. However, Isseks fostered more than just technical skill in his students, which we learn firsthand: another thread of the film is the inclusion of a handful of those people, now adults, revisiting their younger selves. 

So much of the film’s heart lies in the moments where we watch former students such as Rachel Raimist and Jeff Dutemple witness their younger selves confronting corrupt politicians and speaking up at town hall meetings. Isseks encouraged his students to pursue the truth and empowered them not just with cameras and microphones, but also with the assurance that he had their backs. As a fellow former high school teacher, I was positively geeking out on the pedagogy Isseks demonstrates. He takes kinetic learning to a whole new level. He first gives the students camera equipment and allows them to learn how to use it by making whatever they wanted, whether it was a dramatic narrative or a music video. He then suggests that if anyone would be interested, he has a journalism project that students could opt into. That project, an investigation into some tainted water in a friend’s neighborhood, quickly expanded into something much bigger. Primarily through the students’ footage, we see them discover a sinister plot that unfolds even as the first class of students graduates. Year after year, Middletown seniors carry the project like a torch, dedicating countless extracurricular hours to their investigation, drawing both ire and praise. 

The idea of cultivating this kind of engagement is a teacher’s dream! I had enough trouble just trying to get a film club off the ground because the kids couldn’t agree on a day that they would all stay late. During the post-screening Q&A, I asked McBaine and Moss what their take was: why are kids now so hard to corral for a common goal compared to those students back then? McBaine wisely observed that 1991 was a turning point: with cultural moments such as the police brutality on Rodney King being filmed and shared by average people, “was a moment where cameras were recognized for changing culture.” Perhaps, she continued, it was the excitement of access to these tools, and the necessity of working as a team. Building on that, Moore also posited that because of smartphones and social media, “the trend is so towards self-presentation and not the collaborative work that we see here… we don’t need to team up.” While that can feel a little disheartening, Moore went on to speculate that “maybe actually the next wave of investigative journalism will look and feel differently and we should be listening to the 17 year olds in this room.” It’s this kind of optimism that drives the film, and that drives Isseks: he urges his students to act in what he calls “civic courage,” to “behave as if you live in a democracy.” Even when the present looks bleak, we should still imagine that we can contribute to a better future. 

Aside from nostalgia, there’s another Greek word that this film invokes. Present-day Isseks, in the replica of his old classroom, reflects on the philosophical distinction between topos and khora. While they respectively mean “place” and “space,” they are not synonymous. A topos is a physical location, but a khora is, in Isseks’s words, “a womb for the birth of something.” Isseks’s lessons went beyond the topos of the classroom; his class was a khora for his students to develop their drive, their sense of self. Whether you work in education or not, you should let his pedagogy inform the way you approach any of the youth in your life. When given the space to be taken seriously, young people can do incredible things; the perceived invincibility of adolescence can be a superpower for good. We all had that superpower once; perhaps this film can act as a khora for each of us to foster it back to life. 

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