The Great Experiment

followed by a live Zoom Q+A with the film's co-director Stephen Maing 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 over four consequential years, from 2017 to 2021, the film considers the results of what George Washington once called "our last great experiment" in democracy. The approach is spatial and observational—less interested in the ideological binary of left and right than in the vast, complicated country that exists at the intersection of many kinds of American experience. Much as Robert Frank traveled the U.S. in the mid-1950s—bearing witness yet refusing to editorialize in his seminal photographic anthology of America—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 emerge.