Film
Hoopeston
Cert:(adv PG)
Dir. Thomas Bender
USA , 78 mins, 2008
Cast:
Part of Uncharted States Redux
From 1993 to 2008, the New York Underground Film Festival was one of the most vital and unpredictable fixtures on the world's bulging calendar of festivals – yielding several well-received titles for Bradford's Uncharted States of America strands. One of the big hits at last year's final NYUFF (it's now transmogrified into a new event, known as Migrating Forms) was the premiere of the terrific landscape documentary Hoopeston, which the festival's own ever-idiosyncratic website describes thus:
Hoopeston is a tale of the town that corn forgot. A documentary in four parts – Decline; Real Estate; Religion; The Crystal Web – it is part poignant portrait of heartland America, part real-life Christopher Guest on toad’s milk. Two-and-a-half hours south of Chicago near the Illinois-Indiana border, once the global capital of sweet corn production, Hoopeston, according to residents, went from a town of “overachievers to underachievers in the span of just ten to fifteen years.”
Church. Meth. Republicans. That’s about what’s left when town officials, hoping to create jobs, start offering to give away prominent downtown buildings to anyone with a business plan. Guess who’s coming to dinner but – whoops – a displaced Wiccan sect shopping downmarket for a good spot to open the “nation’s first witch school”, Witch School. A beads industry mover and shaker from Virginia Beach; a pagan CEO with a chequered romantic past; the Orson Welles-esque leader of the Corellian Tradition, since age thirteen... take a trip with these egos to the dork side.
But Hoopeston is much, much more than merely yet another quirky documentary about oddball small-town Americana: inventive and strikingly bold in both form and visuals, this is an atmospheric and distinctive exploration of place that's also a must-see for anyone interested in contemporary “alternative” religions, post-industrial economics and/or the USA's ever-unpredictable social frictions.
Neil Young
Other films showing that are part of Uncharted States are:
