Review: OT Our Town

The most impressive thing about this documentary for me was the editing. The cuts between the different scenes choices B-roll were very poignant.

The story telling in this documentary was a more distanced approach, with just observation and interviews and without any sort of narration. This establishes us as an audience that feels like we have a direct connection to the main characters without having to access them through an interpreter or a middle-man. This approach makes editing all the more difficult because the storyteller can only relate ideas through the implication of experiences rather than writing a fancy paragraph to convey ideas to us.

The incredibly creative thing that this documentary did in place of their own narration was to pull out poignant portions of a film version of "Our Town," which is the play that these high school kids are performing. This was a very fun way to contrast of the play’s heritage to the student's heritage, and lead the story in the same fashion that a first person narration would do, without making the audience feel like they are being spoon fed the story.

The director decided to tell the story on a linear timetable, because the inciting moment, rising action, and climax are all very implicit in the set-up of events which leads to a natural story arch which leaves little reason to take another approach to the story. everything for these students is leading up to whether the performance of their play will be a success or not and the viewers of the film have to watch if they’re going to get the payoff of learning if the event will be a success of not

The most effective scenes were the ones that raised the stakes and set up the story for a large payoff at the end of the documentary. We followed various individuals into their homes and throughout their lives and learned many different reasons why they shouldn't be able to put on a successful play. These are the kinds of setups that make us cringe when Netflix has to buffer in the third act of the documentary, because we can hardly stand not seeing how the story ends.

The talking heads in this documentary were particularly effective, because the characters sometimes had opposing goals. A lot of the students seemed to have a really hard time with the English teacher that was directing the play. Hearing a talking head from both the students and the teacher herself allowed us to notice the tension between the individuals a lot more. This is the same strategy that reality television shows use to add tension in their stories, but in this documentary the tension seems more organic and less contrived.

The only time I ever really felt like I may have been manipulated in this story is when we finally get to the play that the students are putting on and everything goes very well. Granted, it is a happy way to finish of the story of these High School students, but it seemed like there was a much higher chance that things were going to go wrong because of all of the things that were going wrong right before the play. Maybe this is just the way the story went and I don’t have a reason to really be skeptical, but I have my suspicions that the documentarians may have overplayed the disasters of the play in order to add more drama to the piece.