Kathy Huang/Sundance Institute
What’s it like to be a teenager in 2021?
Teens have always been great movie subjects, perhaps especially for documentaries. Watching a nonfiction movie set in a high school, adults can sigh with both nostalgia and relief. High schools are microcosms of society as well as a peek into the future, and the arc of a school year makes for a natural story progression.
For decades, documentarians have often trained their cameras on teenagers. But being a teenager in 2021 is not like being a teenager in 1981, or, for that matter, 2011. Teenagers now write, direct, distribute, and star in their own mini-documentaries virtually every day, thanks to smartphones and social media. And making a nonfiction film in which your subjects are used to not just being on camera, but directing and editing and constructing their own image for it, is a special challenge.