Medora

An unflinching look a small Indiana town that at first glance appears to be dying. We follow several members of a very small high school's basketball team. The boys emerge as distinct personalities; the direction is unobtrusive, the musical score is unobtrusive but moving, the boys are awkward but gradually emerge as dignified presences. Some might see a bit of sentimentality here – but the reality of poverty, the boys' very tentative hopes to simply survive, and the whole towns' overwhelming dissociation from almost everything we see on television and from Hollywood is immensely touching. Beautifully photographed - there are several priceless views of the boys' watchful, proud, mostly silent mothers. The coaches – a policeman, a young pastor, an older stonemason - are good men doing immensely important work simply because - it is the right thing to do. Definitely worthwhile.

Medora was a very warmly received in its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. On the surface the film is an inverse version of Hoosiers; it is the story of a small town Indiana basketball that hasn't won a basketball game in a very long time. But when one looks below the surface, Medora is about a small Indiana town where the factories have closed and most residents are struggling with poverty and all of the social maladies that it produces – like alcoholism, drug abuse and dysfunctional families. The Medora High School's losing basketball team becomes an emblem for all of the Medora's struggles and really for the struggles of thousands of small towns like Medora across the country (although especially in the Midwest). The major reason that the team struggles is that the school is so small that it lacks a student body large enough to compete with other consolidated schools with 10x the student body.

Medora is not a sports film in the traditional sense that it has very little to do with how the team is coached or what defense they should use. The film digs much deeper as the filmmakers follow the students and get inside their home lives and see the struggles of their families with alcoholism, poverty, and absentee parents. The young men are also reaching manhood and trying to figure out what they want to do with their own lives. Medora offers a touching picture of the struggles of rural America. Hopefully, this beautifully filmed documentary will be picked up for broadcast by PBS so that it can gain the much wider audience that it richly deserves.

And does Medora finally win a basketball game? Well, you'll have to watch the film to find out.