CHICAGO PREMIERE! From the filmmakers behind Boys State (2020) and Girls State (2024), Teenage Wasteland is a fiercely political documentary about civic corruption, teenage gumption, and the legacies we leave behind us.
The latest film from award-winning documentarians Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine, Teenage Wasteland tells the story of a group of high school journalists who uncovered political corruption and environmental injustice in their small upstate New York hometown of Middletown back in 1996. On assignment from their English teacher Fred Isseks, the students soon discover that the toxicity in their town is not just limited to the brown muck rising from their local landfill, but can also be found in its leadership as well. Armed with video cameras, the students turn their investigation and activism into a class project entitled “Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed.”
A mixture of archival footage, outtakes, diaries entries, and new interviews with Fred and several of his students thirty years later, the documentary is both a sobering look at how corruption arises in an unsteady democracy, a joyful celebration of a group of kids who dared to speak to truth to power, and a nostalgic reunion for an inspiring teacher and his courageous students. Teenage Wasteland premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (under the title Middletown).
