Putty Hill

This mesmerising, formally daring film heralds a distinctive new voice in American indie cinema in the form of writer-director Matthew Porterfield. To call his second film a docu-fiction hybrid may be jumping the gun, even though it toys with notions of what’s real and fictionalised. Charting the local reaction to the death of a teen known only as Cory, the film is composed of a series of banal but revealing interviews which depict a fractured community numb to the pain of suffering and loss. This could have tipped over into a hateful gallery of grotesque, white-trash poseurs, but Porterfield’s rejection of obvious irony makes this not only a warm film, but one which shows the real face of America’s poor, young and disenfranchised.