Seventeen Trailer (1985)

Trailer for Seventeen.

Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’ film follows a group of teenagers during their last year of high school in Muncie, Indiana. With the lone-filmmaker aesthetic they pioneered and an organic editing style, they created a free-flowing intimacy that shapes one of the most honest, and beautiful, portrayals of working-class life ever to appear on screen. At odds with an unclear future, the kids smoke dope, get drunk, sass their teachers, and break every grown-up taboo against race-mixing. Through a range of experience – from a white girl having a cross burned in her yard because she has a black boyfriend, a mourning-by-kegger of a friend lost in a car accident, to another young friend fathering a baby – DeMott and Kreines honor the kids’ complexity and celebrate their liveliness. A rare chance to see this 1985 Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize winning film.