SYNOPSIS

A film by Stephen Maing & Eric Daniel Metzgar

What happens when neighbors become strangers, when shared spaces become contested ground and when the very idea of a common future stops feeling possible? THE GREAT EXPERIMENT considers the results of what George Washington once called “our last great experiment” in democracy. Filmed in striking black and white across the US over four years, from 2017 to 2021, the film does not set out to adjudicate the political battles of its era, but instead observe and engage the recent past with the critical distance of an archive.

The approach is spatial and observational – less interested in the ideological binary of left and right than in the vast, complicated country that exists at the intersection of many kinds of American experience. With rare and intimate access, the camera moves across an extraordinary range of scenes: Gays for Trump; ICE arrests and deportations; flustered Antifa activists; and migrants navigating a country whose welcome has grown uncertain. It witnesses Civil War reenactors summoning the same rhetorical reasoning as Confederate monuments protesters.

In much the way Robert Frank traveled US in the mid-1950s – bearing witness yet refusing to editorialize in his seminal photographic anthology of America – the film weaves these lives together not to resolve their contradictions, but to hold them in the same frame long enough for something rare to emerge: not more analysis, but rather a moment of genuine reflection amid upheaval. It offers a chance to step back from the noise and see this country, in all its diversity and difference, honestly and without looking away.

TEAM

DIRECTED, PRODUCED + EDITED BY Stephen Maing, Eric Daniel Metzgar

PRODUCED BY Farihah Zaman

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY | PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY Stephen Maing, Eric Daniel Metzgar

EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY Anne Marie Stein, Richard MacMillan, Kirsten Johnson, Jon Levin, Agnes Mentre, Lyda Kuth

CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY Rachel Traub & Jihan Robinson

CINEMATOGRAPHERS Nathan Golon, Zac Manuel, Ray Whitehouse, Erik Ljung, Jason Outenreath, Amy Bench, Micah Garen

MUSIC BY Meredith Monk, Live Footage, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Che Chen & Ka Baird

COLOR GRADEING Natacha Ikoli

DI/FINISHING Pierce Varous - Nice Dissolve

SOUND DESIGN & MIX Cesar Gonzales Jesus Arteaga

STORY PRODUCERS Maria Gambale, Jane Teeling