The Great Experiment

What happens when neighbors become strangers, when shared spaces become contested ground and when the very idea of a common future stops feeling possible? THE GREAT EXPERIMENT considers the results of what George Washington once called “our last great experiment” in democracy. Filmed in striking black and white across the US over four years, from 2017 to 2021, the film does not set out to adjudicate the political battles of its era but instead observes and engages the recent past with the critical distance of an archive.

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. With rare and intimate access, the camera moves across an extraordinary range of scenes: Gays for Trump; ICE arrests and deportations; flustered Antifa activists; and migrants navigating a country whose welcome has grown uncertain. It witnesses Civil War reenactors summoning the same rhetorical reasoning as Confederate monuments protesters.

Much as Robert Frank traveled the U.S. in the mid-1950s, bearing witness to the seen and unseen in his landmark photobook The Americans, 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 come into focus: not more analysis, but rather a moment of genuine reflection amid upheaval. It offers a chance to step back from the noise and see this country, in all its plurality, its grief, its stubbornness, its grace – not more simply, but more fully, honestly and without looking away.