‘The Great Experiment’ Trailer: Directors Stephen Maing And Eric Daniel Metzgar Document America At Crucial Moment Of Division

EXCLUSIVE: President Lincoln, quoting the Bible, famously said of America on the brink of civil war, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In our present moment of intense political division, those words seem particularly relevant.

The new documentary The Great Experiment, directed by Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar, explores this era of political antagonism, covering the period from 2017-2021 that culminated with the attack on the U.S. Capitol and President Biden’s inauguration. The film’s title comes from our first president, George Washington, who described America’s democratic form of government as “our last great experiment.”

We have your exclusive first look at the film in the trailer above.

The Great Experiment opens in New York City at IFC Center on October 16 for a week-long engagement, followed by a Los Angeles opening at Laemmle Glendale beginning October 23. From there, the film will “embark on a nationwide social cinema tour designed to bring the film back to the regions and communities featured throughout the documentary,” according to a release, “extending its exploration of how people navigate division and fostering meaningful local dialogue.” Among the planned theatrical tour stops are Milwaukee, Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, New Orleans, Austin, Baltimore and Memphis, with additional cities and community screenings expanding continually.

“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,” notes a synopsis. “Filmed in striking black and white across the US from 2017 to 2021, the film engages the recent past with the critical distance of archival footage, considering the results of what George Washington called ‘our last great experiment’ in democracy. Its approach is spatial and observational, less interested in the ideological binary of left and right than in the vast, complicated country that lies between. 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.”

The documentary held its world premiere at True/False in Columbia, MO in March and has gone on to screen at CPH:DOX in Copehagen, DC/DOX in the nation’s capital, Full Frame in Durham, NC, and RiverRun International Film Festival based in Winston-Salem, NC, among others. It is set to screen at the upcoming Woodstock Film Festival in New York and Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey.

The Great Experiment is produced by Farihah Zaman, Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar. Executive producers include Anne Marie Stein, Richard MacMillan, Agnes Mentre, Lyda Kuth, and Kirsten Johnson. Co-executive producers are Rachel Traub and Jihan Robinson.

In a directors’ statement, Maing and Metzgar note they filmed in dozens of regions throughout the United States: “…Eschewing traditional interviews and narration for immersive observation, this documentary explores the vast connections between personal needs, deeply held values and the impreciseness of political affiliation. At a time when many Americans were defined by their allegiance or disavowal of Trump, we set out to film in a way that decentered that binary and, in lieu of a more expansive frame, that could account for people’s feelings of profound disconnection with sensitivity to more social and structural factors in our identities. Our hope was to build a captivating cinema of encounters and juxtapositions that might suggest how someone like a gay Trump supporter may not just be indignant in his allegiance but also on living on the margins of the margins – without a confident sense of belonging to nation, movement or affiliation.

“During our process, we thought about the immediacy and visual ambition of observational films like Fred Wiseman’s High School and Ron Fricke’s epic cinematic poem Baraka, but also the more challenging associative style of narrative exploration as seen in projects like Hale County This Morning, This Evening [directed by RaMell Ross] and Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message —particularly the way any single cut point invites viewers to engage the deeper connections between moments and the historical placement of imagery across time.”

The directors continue, “Shot in black and white, the film engages the recent past with the critical distance of archival footage — inviting the kind of clear-eyed reckoning that only distance, real or imagined, makes possible.”