The great experiment

The Great Experiment is an epic poem in documentary form – a mirror held to an American nation at war with its own reflection, asking not who is right, but whether the experiment itself can survive. Filmed in striking black and white across the US from 2017 to 2021, the film engages the recent past with the critical distance of archival footage, considering the results of what George Washington called "our last great experiment" in democracy. Its approach is spatial and observational, less interested in the ideological binary of left and right than in the vast, complicated country that lies between. Much as Robert Frank traveled the U.S. in the mid-1950s, bearing witness to the seen and unseen in his landmark photobook The Americans, the film weaves these lives together not to resolve their contradictions, but to hold them in the same frame long enough for something surprising to come into focus.

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