(L–R) Jeff Dutemple, Rachel Raimist, Fred Isseks, Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss, David Birmingham, and Mike Regan attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Middletown” at Library Center Theatre on January 28, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Michael Hurcomb/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)

By Shelby Shaw

Debuting in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Middletown, by Festival alumni Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, is spreading the word of a community effort over 30 years in the making.

When upstate New York’s Middletown High School received audiovisual recording equipment, an unconventional and devoted teacher, Fred Isseks, started a class in the early 1990s called Electronic English to take advantage of the resources. Turning his classroom into a production studio, Isseks encouraged his students to find the stories that needed telling, and he taught them how to shoot, produce, and edit the footage, even inviting local news figures to be interviewed by the class. But the rumor that a local landfill was dumping toxic waste into the water supply, unbeknownst to the townspeople, became a fixation for Isseks. His students invested themselves in a mission to uncover the truth and make it be known, with their youthful demeanor helping to sometimes gain access to those who didn’t take their class project seriously.

And then, 30 years later, McBaine and Moss came across the story.

“Fred has really been keeping the flame alive and flickering for this story, knowing that we need to tell it and tell it again and keep telling it,” Moss says during the post-premiere Q&A. In 2020, a profile of Isseks, his class, and their project was published and got the attention of Moss and McBaine, who have two teenagers of their own. Moss tries to remember what the subheading of the article was, saying it was a quote that described the toxic waste situation: “‘It was like a movie.’” The audience laughs as Moss turns to Middletown’s participants onstage, the students from Isseks’ class. “And [McBaine and I] were like, it should be a movie. We want to make it.”

The directing duo went upstate to meet with Isseks over brunch and discuss the idea of turning his class’s history into a documentary, focusing on their investigation into the toxic landfill through youthful drive and empowerment. “It’s like a documentarian’s dream come true that there’s a basement full of 500 hours of footage, you know, and so carefully organized and preserved by Fred, too,” adds McBaine.

“Well, it’s our footage,” Isseks says, sweeping an arm to his former students standing beside him onstage. “We all worked on it.” At this, the audience erupts into applause again. The footage, shot with professional camcorders and recording gear, is a lo-fi blend of serious investigative journalism, interviews with anyone who would help answer the teenagers’ questions, and the b-roll of students goofing around.

When asked what the current status of the landfill is, Isseks says he received an email about it this morning from a friend who says both the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Environmental Protection Agency admit that the landfill is leaking into the river and agree that the situation is a problem. But as Isseks points out, these organizations haven’t done anything to solve the problem. So even today, the landfill continues to leak toxic waste into the river.

“I think we all get it, today in 2025, the message being that if we’re going to get any of these things done, if we’re going to make the world right, if we’re going to straighten things out, it’s going to have to be us.” A thunderous applause breaks out from the crowd, cutting off Isseks as he attempts to start another sentence.

“How many of us had a Fred?” Rachel Raimist, one of Isseks’ former students — and now a television director herself — asks the audience. “How many of us do what we do because we had a teacher who did something that changed the course of your whole life?” After waiting for the room’s applause to die down, Raimist continues. “I get to direct episodic television, which is a dream job that I couldn’t have even imagined, or had the confidence, or the skill set, or the belief that I could achieve something. And I grew up to be a professor and a director.” She lists the accomplishments of her students, including those who are also screening projects at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and one who received a multimillion dollar grant to create public access in Minneapolis. “So the legacy of Fred goes on and on and on.”

What’s Isseks’ advice to the adults and the youth who want to be heard today? “Don’t be overwhelmed, don’t be discouraged, and don’t do it alone.”