Rockport Film Festival 2008

Six Man, Texas is about community and commitment and survival. Set against the backdrop of shrinking rural economies, it is a story of tiny towns with schools too small for 11-man football. Over 120 rural schools in Texas, including Whitharral, Guthrie, Aquilla, Sanderson and Three Way, play a six-man version. Far from being downsized football, the games are lifelines in their small communities. Everyone in town attends, embracing the players as family. This sense of community keeps hope alive in the midst of increasing economic pressures. Three Way School is typical of rural Texas schools with one exception, there is no town. With no viable towns left in Three Way's district, the school has consolidated five rural school districts since 1945. But Three Way School is slowly losing students and struggling to keep the doors open in the face of shrinking revenues. Three Way School finally succumbs, graduating its last class of eight seniors and ending generations of community pride and continuity. In Central Texas, Aquilla has been slowly losing population for decades. Today, 136 people remain to support a school, a cotton gin, a post office and the tradition of Six Man Football. But tiny Aquilla has its first ever Cinderella season. Can Aquilla win, and win what really counts? Can the rural towns of Six Man, Texas keep their schools open and keep playing the game that unifies and defines their small communities?

THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC weaves together a cultural history of one of the most famous paintings in the world with a quirky portrait of Eldon, Iowa, population 998, site of the house that inspired it. The film follows local boosters over two years as they work towards their dream of a Gothic House Visitor Center to attract tourists and save their dying small town. On the single main street through town, yellow banners commemorating the Gothic House flap proudly in the wind, but the one restaurant in Eldon, called Jones' Gothic Room, stands shuttered and closed. THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC explores the poignant irony of a rural America abandoned to economic hardship trying to rebuild itself through tourism that glorifies a happier, if largely imaginary, country past.THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC is both a portrait and about a portrait. Stylistically, the film uses interviews, direct cinema, animation and moving image portraiture to explore the deeply satirical nature of Wood’s painting, and to meditate upon surveillance, self-presentation and representation on multiple levels, in painting, photography, history, and the documentary impulse itself. The ongoing fascination with the painting "American Gothic" suggests a hunger for stories from rural America that THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC both taps into and exposes. What do these stories and images from the heartland symbolize? Why are they still so powerful, even in parody or myth? THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC takes viewers on an curious journey of discovery in pursuit of the answers.