Teenage Wasteland Movie

Teaser Trailer

Teenage Wasteland Movie Trailer HD - Plot synopsis:  A high school A/V assignment goes full-on activist when teacher Fred Isseks sends students, armed with video recorders, on an investigative assignment to suss out the brown muck surfacing at the local dump in their upstate New York small town. The toxicity they discover lives not only in the landfill, but in political corruption and environmental injustice in their community. Archival footage of their 1996 class project, "Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed," outtakes, diaries, interviews with Fred and several students 30 years later weave a sobering yet buoyant story both timely and for the ages, about fighting the good fight as its own life-changing triumph. Teenage Wasteland, also known as Middletown, is co-directed by filmmakers Amanda McBaine (producer of Ghosts of Attica, Speedo, The Overnighters) & Jesse Moss (director of Speedo, Con Man, Full Battle Rattle, The Overnighters, The Bandit, Boys & Girls State)

Transcript

00:00Good evening, and welcome to Middletown High School.

00:07Tonight we have a visual history of Middletown and some other surprises.

00:11He never felt like a teacher.

00:13People used to call him Hippie Fred.

00:15Other educators would have us believe Fred was a crackpot.

00:21You don't learn by sitting in a classroom and taking notes.

00:25You learn by doing, by getting involved.

00:30Oh, wow.

00:32Wow, it's like going back in time.

00:35Action.

00:38I thought of myself more of a nuisance.

00:40I was an outsider.

00:42Misdirected youth.

00:44I was sort of against the system, but deep down I was cripplingly shot.

00:50In the 90s, you would have called me a poser.

00:52You're a dick, Jeff.

00:53You're a dick, Jeff.

00:55Yeah, Jeff, you're a dick.

00:56Old school teachers thought it was a joke.

01:02Making a movie is not like writing a five-page essay.

01:07Yeah, this is real life.

01:08That's harder.

01:11Middletown was picture perfect, but Fred was teaching us what's underneath the surface.

01:18Toxic waste was illegally dumped for 20 years.

01:23We're on the edge of some kind of pond.

01:26The smell is making me sick, Fred.

01:27We were meddling kids making a documentary.

01:30Like, that felt really powerful.

01:33Cover-ups from the county, state, and federal level.

01:36I'm nervous for that kid.

01:38I know it's in there because I've buried lots of us.

01:40I don't think any of us had any sense of the scale of this story.

01:45The biggest garbage company was, in fact, run by organized crime.

01:48We're talking about mafia in our neighborhood.

01:51There was a perception that Fred was leading us into danger.

01:55The guy did threaten me.

01:57I think our phones are tapped.

01:59Mr. B advises that I buy a gun.

02:01You're going to stop videotaping me?

02:02I have nothing to hide.

02:03It's more than just a record of environmental crime.

02:11It's this archetype of young people rising up to the challenge and doing something about it.

02:21The school had had enough.

02:22I remember I asked Fred if we should keep going.

02:25He said, yeah, push harder.

02:27And I was like, fuck.

02:29Yeah!

02:31It was a community.

02:32It's one of the only reasons I came to school.

02:38What if we could get it right?

02:40What if society could turn the world back right side up?

02:45That became one of our mottos.

02:47Civic courage.

02:49It means acting as if you live in a real democracy.

02:53That's something for everybody.

02:57That was scary.

03:01It was right.

03:01I was thinking about me.

03:02I want to go.

03:03I want to be kidding.

03:08I know.

03:08I do not.

03:09I already hear what?

03:09I think I'm going to...

03:10I?

03:11I think I'm going to go.

03:12I, I want to Bethesda.

03:12I'm going to go.

03:1316th business.

03:13And I'm going to go.

03:15You, I got Guevara.

03:15and now you're going to watch movies in the darks

03:16that I have.

03:17What if I go, we're going to go play Twitter.

03:18And I worked every week with everybody,

03:19the one and I did not contact myself.

03:20The great thing, right?

03:20You're going to try.

03:21I'm going to love it here.

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