An engaging documentary about the merit and mechanics of its own form, “ Middletown ” is set deep in the slacker era of 1991, when, in a small town in upstate New York, a vanguarding high school teacher oversees a student project that uncovers a local government conspiracy. Built mostly of camcorder archival footage from a Middletown high school audiovisual class, this often winning, occasionally rudderless film follows the students as they work together to investigate toxic waste being dumped in a nearby landfill. Worse still, the landfill was situated atop a major regional aquifer, suggesting that much of the district’s drinking water was harmfully contaminated.
The documentary was directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the filmmaking duo behind the popular documentary mini-franchise “Boys State” (2020) and “Girls State” (2024). But the observational mode of those films is complemented here by a mountain of pristinely archived camcorder footage originally captured by the former Middletown students. McBaine and Moss anchor the grainy dailies with some reenacted sequences, as well as talking-head interviews with the now-adult classmates.
The hero of “Middletown” is Fred Isseks, a warm but idiosyncratic high school teacher who, in the early 1990s, was granted permission by the school to conceive of an audiovisual course. He named it Electronic English. The class, the film shows, was an experimental free-for-all.
Students learned how to use equipment on th.
