The Dells

Screening after: Home

Programmers notes: With her 2011 short Young Bird Season, a vivid and hilarious group portrait of competitive pigeon racers, Nellie Kluz entered the documentary field with a fully formed vision, tackling subjects in the realm of Americana with equal parts embedded fascination and playful comedic distance. Her subsequent body of short films (not to mention extensive camera-operator work on How to with John Wilson) has further honed these concerns, which find their most impactful expression yet in this debut feature.

Here we meet foreign students arriving in an idiosyncratic corner of our country, where culture shock hits hard and fast. Many are bewildered by how much the water parks and strip malls of the Wisconsin Dells differ from the images of the U.S. our pop culture feeds the world—and few fail to notice the dire gap between our minimum wages and a true living wage. Most of us grew up knowing that America isn’t all L.A. or New York City, and not everyone here gets to live a life of economic stability, let alone that of a pop star; The Dells shows us this realization hitting an international group of young adults in real time, with results both humorous and painful.

Paired with the short Home, a documentary by a Lithuanian filmmaker about a single mom in Missouri struggling with new post-COVID economic realities, this is a screening that’ll give you a more honest perspective on the health of the American dream than any state of the union address.  

— Eric Allen Hatch

Director Nellie Kluz expected for a post-film Q+A.