When I was at Sundance in 2001, one of the best documentaries playing was about the turntablist movement in hip-hop, a canny, highly entertaining film called SCRATCH. That was directed by Doug Pray, and when I got a letter about a month ago asking if I’d like to take a look at the new film from Pray before it opened at SXSW, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t care what the subject was... I always feel like a great documentarian can find a story in any subject matter.

Thankfully, Pray picked a rich and untapped milieu for his new film, and the end result is an affectionate, sad, fascinating movie about one of the quiet subcultures here in America, the men and women who drive the trucks that keep almost every industry working. People don’t really think about the impact that truck drivers have on our economy, but they are the backbone of almost every consumer-based business there is. It’s a thankless job, and thanks to the hours involved, it’s more of a lifestyle. You’ve got to be wired a certain way to be able to do it for any length of time or to do it well.

So who are those people? That’s the question that Doug Pray asked that started the ball rolling on this particular project, and working with his producer from SCRATCH, Brad Blondheim, they set out to capture these people in an honest, unflinching manner. They spent eight weeks last year criss-crossing the country, meeting truckers randomly by going to major truck stops and just introducing themselves. They were invited into this private world, and in the end, we meet a dozen individuals (including two married couples) who make up a varied cross-section of humanity, proving that there is no one type behind the wheels of these trucks. The one thing they have in common is their ability to handle the particular demands of the job, and they way they cope is part of what makes the film so fascinating.

Pray chose to use HD to shoot this film, a choice that I’m sure will start to make more and more sense to documentarians in the next few years. You have longer to shoot without interruption, and you have the ability to immediately check what you’re shooting to make sure you got what you want.

In this case, though, Pray used it to help foster a sense of intimacy with his subjects. He was able to hitch a ride with them, alone, and shoot without a crew. Blondheim and the rest of the support team followed along in a van, meaning it was entirely up to Pray to get the interviews. That intimacy means that the truckers opened up in a way they might not have if there’d been a full crew surrounding them. Part of the film’s power comes from the fact that it gives these people a voice that they might otherwise never have. There is a lot of heartbreak on display here, and there are times it’s almost too much, but Pray manages to strike just the right balance. There’s also a surprising amount of strength required for these people to continue doing what they do in the face of an increasingly-difficult environment for them. The money they used to make is drying up as gas prices and other costs skyrocket, and the culture of truck driving seems increasingly hostile and even dangerous. That will to continue, that drive to survive... that the thing that unites these people and that’s the theme that emerges over the course of the film. This is a movie that celebrates the human spirit, and I hope it finds an audience both at SXSW and in theaters whenever some smart distributor picks it up and releases it, and the sooner the better.

James Scurlock’s MAXED OUT was a hit at last year’s SXSW, and it’s finally hitting theaters in limited release this weekend. I had a chance to see it last week, and it’s one of the most infuriating, upsetting movies I’ve seen in a while. Scurlock’s also published a companion book, and I recommend both of them to anyone curious about the way debt is crippling America right now, and the way it’s infected our culture. I was talking with a friend of mine about the film, and he started getting angry, talking about personal responsibility and the way people get themselves into trouble. That’s certainly true, and I don’t think Scurlock’s film tries to make the case that people shouldn’t be responsible for their own debt. It’s just that we live in a country where the system is designed to exploit the poor and where victimization is not only encouraged, but actively rewarded on the corporate level.

The film uses a number of different people and perspectives to make its points, and unsurprisingly, the banking and credit card companies refused to be part of the film. It’s probably a good thing, too, because there’s little or nothing they could say to defend themselves after what we see in this film. The idea that debt is an industry is repulsive, and they show the way the entire system works. When a credit card company charges off a card because a customer can’t pay, they sell the account to a company whose sole purpose for existing is to hound those people and try to collect money, no matter what. The worst material in the movie deals with one of these companies and the two guys, Bob and Chris, who run it. They are gleeful scumbags, positively in love with the idea of humiliating people in order to shame them into paying. The way they smack their lips and rub their hands together as they talk about their techniques made me sick.

There’s another section of the film that is almost too hard to watch involving two women, mothers of children who got their first credit cards when they enrolled in college. Both kids got in over their heads quickly. Both kids ended up with what they saw as insurmountable debt within a year. And both kids, wracked with guilt and unable to handle the idea of starting their professional lives so far behind already, eventually killed themselves. Watching these two mothers try to make sense of what happened is wrenching and awful. It’s also just a little bit of a cheap shot, coming back to that idea of personal responsibility. Do credit card companies target college freshmen now, knowing how many of them have no realistic sense of how to handle their finances? Of course. And once those kids are in the hole, do companies compound things intentionally, burying them as quickly as possible? Absolutely. In the end, are those kids responsible for those mistakes? Yes. They are. It’s still impossible to watch these scenes without feeling sick to your stomach, especially if you’re a parent. The grief and the fury of these women is hard to deny.

The further the film digs into the industry, the worse it gets, and by the end of it, I found myself wondering how it can ever be fixed. As a country, we live like those college freshmen, borrowing and borrowing and spending and spending. We loot social security in order to pay off just a fraction of the interest on the debt we’ve amassed. We act like someone’s going to come along and bail us out and none of it really matters. Like this debt isn’t real.

But when you see the scenes in the film involving a retarded man living in poverty with his mother, who appears to also be slightly retarded, and you see how they’ve been targeted by credit card companies, and when you see the sections of the film that deal with the way the laws of this country protect the guilty and punish the people who are already drowning, it’s obvious that there’s a bigger debt than money owed by someone, and it’s equally obvious that debt will most likely never be paid.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles