THE AMERICAN SECTOR

Along the way, interviews with unusual characters who own, maintain, and interact with pieces of the wall offer a window into American culture, and through the film these Cold War relics become a catalyst for exploring today’s timely issues.

“An exemplary work of cinema as political action. A film that powerfully evokes the active presence of history in daily civic life—and reveals the politics that inhere in its commemoration. Yields extraordinary results through audacious methods…. The slabs of the Wall become something more than common ground for onscreen discussions: they function as truth devices, extracting deep-rooted and deeply personal observations as if with a metaphysical force that also energizes the camera and microphone, transforming discourse about the enduring power of history into seemingly physical, weighty incarnations of it.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Detached and incisive, wry and deceptively whimsical, The American Sector is a brisk lesson in how we often fail to learn from history because even the most concrete testimony is open to interpretation.” – Boston Globe

“The film’s strengths lie in its simplicity. The shots are carefully composed and lingering, giving us a visual representation of the United States from Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive to a Chicago subway station to a food court in Seattle. Furthermore, the thoughts of the subjects are captured with the ear of an ethnographer and edited for clarity and curiosity, which allows for moments of gravity as well as humor. For each person, the wall means something explicit about freedom, democracy, and patriotism, but implicit in these descriptions are ideas about propaganda, indoctrination, our intergenerational relationships with history, and the broken promises of capitalism.” – The Nation