DADETOWN
Dir. Russ Hexter, 1995.
US. 93 min.
In English.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13 - 10PM
FRIDAY, MAY 22 - 7:30PM (Q&A with co-writer John Housley)
SATURDAY, MAY 31 - 10PM

“We arrived in late March, 1994 to film a simple 15-minute segment for a public television special about small towns in America. Although we were only hired to stay for two weeks, our plans would change.”

So begins the story of DADETOWN, which follows its titular upstate New York town through a fraught moment of post-industrial transformation. As the paper clip factory that has long served as the town’s chief employer begins closing, a hi-tech computer company called American Peripheral Imaging sets its sights on Dadetown as the location for its newest expansion. The arrival of API (and the legions of yuppie arrivistes they bring with them) exposes deep fault lines in the community, largely between those who stand to gain from the infusion of big business and those who may be left by the wayside.

Director Russ Hexter (who tragically died at age 27 shortly after the film's Sundance premiere) captures the nuances and absurdities of this escalating conflict through candid interviews with the townsfolk and the API interlopers, in the process documenting the power and the challenges of working-class solidarity in its tight-knit community. Long before our current firestorms around tariffs and data centers, DADETOWN asks urgent questions about labor, tech and capital that we're still wrestling with to this day.

On May 22nd, we'll be joined by co-writer John Housley for a Q&A about the film.

Special thanks to John Housley, Jim Carden and Maren Hexter.