Film

Dadetown (1995)

Director: Russ Hexter

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

The film's crew sets out to make a documentary about an archetypal small town, and realises it's on the brink of breakdown. The antagonism between the town's older inhabitants (mostly employed at a factory going out of business) and newcomers who've moved on to smart new estates in order to work at an obscure but powerful communications company looks set to turn horribly violent. Hexter's involving analysis of the social, economic, political and technological factors undermining a once happy community is absolutely persuasive - and entirely false, for this is a dazzlingly authentic bogus documentary, whose status as a forgery is admitted only in a few hilarious, faintly absurdist gags. A brilliant debut, perfectly shot, scripted and performed; the tragedy is that Hexter died, still in his mid-30s, soon after it was made.

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