With her incredible documentary Rich Hill, Tracy Droz Tragos takes us into the homes and minds of three teenage boys–Appachey, Andrew, and Harley–living in poverty in rural Rich Hill, Missouri. The boys’ experiences aren’t atypical; there are thousands of towns just like Rich Hill throughout the country, but rarely do we see such an honest, intimate portrait of the hard circumstances dealt to these families, who deserve our attention as much as any megastar gracing the silver screen.

We spoke to Tracy in San Francisco about misconceptions about small, rural towns, why she chose to film teenage boys, filming the boys like heroes, Harley’s willingness to share dark details about his past, the love shared by the three families, and more. Rich Hill is playing now in select theaters and on demand.

Places like Rich Hill are a part of our identity as a country, but we rarely see communities like it in media. Excuse me if this sounds ignorant, but for someone like me, who grew up in the suburbs of Northern California, it’s almost like a different world.
Tracy: Right. Rich Hill isn’t unique or extreme in any way. It’s like a lot of cities across U.S. that you drive by or fly over. Folks from California and New York may not know much about places like this, but I hope ultimately in our treatment of the film that there is some connection, even if you don’t recognize the place necessarily. Audiences will hopefully feel a connection to the families.

I definitely connected with the familial aspect. The film is very, very cinematic. You obviously see a lot of aesthetic beauty in Rich Hill that perhaps city folk like me wouldn’t see.
Tracy: It’s hard to see past the impoverished aspects of the city–the mess in the yard, the mess in the home. It’s hard to see past that. You immediately push away and don’t want to look deeper. My husband, who has no connection to Rich Hill, didn’t want to go back there for a long time. It’s a hard place to see. But we really wanted to give it a cinematic treatment, and we wanted it to be beautiful. As much as there is hardship, there’s also stuff that can be celebrated and glimmers of potential and hope within these kids and their families. We wanted audiences to see that, too.

Have you seen Jeanne Dielman?
Tracy: No, I have not!

It’s Chantal Akerman’s film, and it’s 200 minutes of a woman doing chores.
Tracy: Is it a documentary?

No! It’s narrative. Her whole statement was that a woman’s work is as worthy of being on the big screen as John Wayne. I get a similar feeling from your film. These people deserve to be on movie screens as much as anyone else.
Tracy: I appreciate that very much. We chose to shoot on a high-end camera and in the way that we did to make these kids and their families heroes. We wanted to shoot from a low angle and give a sense that they could take on the world. There’s this potential in them. We wanted to give them a beautiful movie, not the in-and-out treatment you see in reality TV. That’s a big part of what we’re trying to do, so thanks for that.

Why did you choose to follow kids? Boys, specifically.
Tracy: We chose kids because it’s harder to dismiss them. They still have hopes and dreams. Their parents’ dreams had been checked. These kids still had this optimism. Often, families who are struggling are cast aside because people think it’s their own fault, it’s their own choice that they’re in the circumstances they’re in, or they had some moral failing. We wanted to push past that, and any empathy audiences felt for the kids would hopefully radiate out to their families. In terms of the choice to have it be boys, that wasn’t an original intention, but it was a place the film made sense to be. To tell as intimate a story as we wanted to tell, we had to get pretty darn specific, and the experience of these boys…they had so few role models. Their brushes with the juvenile justice system and their anger felt so specific to their experience, so it felt like that’s where the film needed to be.

The making of this film spawned another film that I’m working on now, the story of a young woman who became pregnant at 15 and now has a six-month-old son. I’m following her and her trajectory. It’s pretty exciting what Linklater did with Boyhood, and this will be five years in the lives of their young family.

I feel like that film will be a great complement to this one, because Rich Hill is about boys, but it’s also about their mothers.
Tracy: Exactly. And this is kind of the prequel to it, because these mothers were all teenagers when they had kids. That robs you of a certain opportunity to be a child, and that makes the parent-child lines blurred. I’m hopeful for Sarah and her son, but they’ve got a tough road ahead of them, and how they navigate that is still to be seen. It’s tough. I was shooting with her two weeks ago, and she wants to go back to 10th grade, but she can’t afford decent child care for her son.

That’s a tough deal. There’s that heartbreaking moment in Rich Hill when Appachey’s mom talks about not being able to have a life because she was a young mother.
Tracy: It is a tough deal. All of the folks in the film…their trajectories have shifted in some way. Experiencing audiences’ reactions and they themselves seeing the film. Appachey’s mom now says that, if she doesn’t have hopes and dreams, her kids won’t either. The film hasn’t fixed everything, but she’s talking about getting her GED and working towards getting a job not in the fast food industry, not for herself, but for her kids.

There’s so much love in the film. The image of Andrew putting his arm around his mom with a big smile on his face is so beautiful because he’s so proud to be her son.
Tracy: Exactly. That’s what he’s talking about at the beginning of the film, when he says “We’re not trash.” That came from a conversation about how people perceive his parents as trash. “We’re not trash; we’re good people.”

He’s always got a smile on his face. Such an optimistic soul.
Tracy: He touched me and continues to touch me with his optimism.

So you stay in touch with the kids?
Tracy: Oh yes. Absolutely. I feel very strongly about the importance of that. They’ve given so much. I couldn’t imagine making this film and then just saying, “See ya!”

There’s a bit at the end of the film where Harley is joking around with you. He’s so quick-witted and charming!
Tracy: His sense of humor is amazing. He’ll come up with something when you least expect it. We sort of broke the fourth wall there at the end, partly because he’d given us so much and been so brave, and we wanted to give him a little bit back.

It’s such a powerful moment when you’re following Harley down the street on Halloween as he talks about his views on rape.
Tracy: What had happened to him came up more than once. That wasn’t the only time. There was this feeling of him wanting to get this off his chest. In part it was to explain, “This is why his mother was in prison, these are the circumstances.” No one in town knew about it, and he didn’t have much of an opportunity to talk about it, so he really wanted this to be in the film and to share this with audiences. We didn’t know where the film would go, but in the best case scenario, it would go out to theaters and television. He still wanted audiences to bear witness to that. It’s something he lives with so close to the surface, and that moment really revealed that.

The film is very transportive; you really make us feel like we’re visitors in Rich Hill. How do you achieve that kind of atmosphere as a filmmaker?
Tracy: Our choice of cinematography–the way we shot, the camera we shot on, the small moments–was important, but it was also our sound design. We worked with Pete Horner at Skywalker, and we talked a lot about the small hand gestures and brining audiences closer using that. We actually ended up doing some foley.

Wow! Give me an example.
Tracy: We particularly used it with Harley and his hand gestures. He plays around with his shirt a lot. The foley was a way of brining you closer to his head space. We wanted a hymnal quality to our score that we hoped wouldn’t bring audiences down and demand you pity these people, but would help you notice the small details and put you in a meditative head space. There were a lot of ways we strove for this to be an intimate, quieter kind of film. The editing is a slow burn that asks audiences to sit back, relax, and go along for the whole ride. We hope audiences will.

What camera did you shoot with?
Tracy: We shot on a RED Scarlet.

Dang!
Tracy: I know, I know! It was a big deal. It was maybe two whole credit cards when we bit the bullet on that one. But yeah, the 4K footage is pretty beautiful.

There are some scenes where you’re shooting in such low light I couldn’t believe it. That must have been a challenge.
Tracy: Yeah, it was. We didn’t light at all. It was a small crew, handheld, and we didn’t want to light. Most of that was because of the intrusion that would create for the families. There were times when the lighting was too low to shoot.

Rich Hill isn’t the most brightly lit town in the world.
Tracy: Folks were living in closets sometimes, and maybe there was one bare lightbulb in the whole house.

The film is totally eye-opening, especially for someone like me who, I must embarrassingly admit, has perhaps been a bit subconsciously dismissive of rural families in poverty. Have you spoken to others who’ve been enlightened by the film in this way?
Tracy: It’s incredible to experience the film with audiences and the families in the film. The families get a feeling of belonging that hey haven’t experienced in their lives, and it’s really great. Having audiences say that they care about their futures really makes a difference. We hope that empathy radiates out to other families like them, who don’t have films made about them, but are just as deserving of some measure of hope, resources, and attention. It starts by making what may be invisible visible.

“We’re not trash. We’re good people.” These are some of the first words we hear in Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo’s Rich Hill. The film, a Grand Jury Prize winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, focuses on three adolescents living in Rich Hill, Missouri, a town of just under 1,400. That opening line acts as a sort of thesis for Tragos and Palermo, whose Direct Cinema approach concerns itself with showing their subjects trying to persevere through (mostly financial) problems in their lives. The human qualities of Rich Hill make it a somewhat affective, but disappointingly limited documentary.

The aforementioned statement comes from Andrew, a high-schooler and probably the most balanced of the three subjects. He’s a young and caring kid, affectionately playing with his sisters and taking care of his ill mother. His close bond to his family is most likely due to the fact that it’s hard for him to keep friends; his parents frequently move across the state and country looking for work, yet they always end up back in Rich Hill. His father jumps from one job to the other, trying on different occupations instead of settling on one career. Andrew expresses dissatisfaction with his parents constantly changing locales, but he remains optimistic. “God wanted us to come back here for a reason,” Andrew says as his family moves back to Rich Hill. “I haven’t found it out yet, but I will.”

Appachey is the next subject, a middle schooler with a large amount of developmental issues. His mother Delana lists them off at one point, including ADHD, OCD, ODD and possibly Asperger’s. He carries himself like he’s lived a lot longer than he has, casually smoking a cigarette and telling the camera about his father walking out on him and his family when he was 6. A lot of Appachey’s problems come across as the results of boredom and frustration, as he doesn’t have any idea of what he’d like to do with himself. At one point he considers going to China and becoming an artist, just because he likes the idea of drawing dragons all day. Without any focus or medicinal help (he’s non-compliant, according to Delana) he only has his mother’s tough love to rein him in, but even she’s beginning to lose her patience.

The last subject is Harley, a 15-year-old with the roughest background. His mother’s currently serving a prison sentence, a detail the directors don’t get into until later in the film. Harley faced different traumas while growing up, and shows clear issues with handling his anger. It’s evident that he had a close relationship with his mother before she went to jail, but despite her lack of a presence beyond phone calls and letters Harley tries to live a normal teenage life. Scenes of him going out with friends or dressing up as a Juggalo for Halloween are contrasted with issues about his truancy at school and possibly going to juvenile detention.

Tragos and Palermo don’t take an entirely detached perspective from their subjects, a quality that works in their favour. Most scenes play out with the camera quietly observing, except for a few moments where the teens interact with the crew. Harley shows concern with his hair looking bad on camera, prompting him to put some water in his hair and comb it. While he combs his hair, he warns the camera operator to keep their equipment away if any water gets on it. This kind of moment adds a level of comfort to the film by calling attention to itself, while simultaneously showing Harley for the kind, considerate person he is underneath his angry exterior.

Rich Hill’s subject matter offers plenty of potential areas to explore, but only some are looked at. The town acts as a representative for the small, Midwestern cities across the US dealing with hard economic times. These people are living in extreme poverty. At one point we see Andrew’s family use a coffee maker and an iron to heat water for a bath. These are the kinds of lives where long-term thinking isn’t possible. It’s a world of survival under hard circumstances made by choice or from external, uncontrollable factors.

For a brief moment, Rich Hill brushes with the idea of exploring what it’s like to live a lifestyle where wants don’t exist, as the needs are barely attainable. Delana explains her life story at one point, how she moved out at 17 before marrying and having kids. “I never got to have any dreams or ideals about my life,” she says. “I never had any dreams or hopes.” One of Rich Hill’s most fascinating qualities is watching its subjects, especially the parents, psychologically cope with their lack of financial stability. Andrew’s mother, suffering from an unnamed medical issue, implies she has a dependency on sleeping medication; Andrew’s father refuses to settle anywhere, constantly changing up jobs and locations for the hope of a better life; Delana eventually hands Appachey over to the juvenile detention system, unable to handle things on her own. This information helps paint an interesting picture, but Tragos and Palermo don’t seem too interested in filling in the missing pieces.

The two filmmakers prefer to lean on a more humanistic approach, choosing to back up Andrew’s statement in the opening instead of delving deeper into their subjects’ lives. This method isn’t entirely successful, as Andrew, Appachey and Harley’s stories are all fascinating in their own right, but the overall impact is lacking. There’s no need to prove or highlight these children or their families as “good people” because it’s already there. Breaking through a stereotype to show the person behind it is admirable, but this kind of approach feels overdone given the specific stereotypes being addressed here. It’s disappointing in its simplicity.

Rich Hill still makes for a well-done documentary. With over 450 hours of footage, Editor Jim Hession cuts it down to a well-paced 90 minutes. Andrew Droz Palermo also worked as Director of Photography, with some moments (especially the opening and closing montages of the town) providing great imagery. As Rich Hill closes, Harley talks to the camera before grabbing the bus to school. He tells the crew he’ll see them later as he gets on the bus, but we don’t. The bus drives off, and with a cut to black the documentary starts the standard pre-credit “Where are they now?” title cards. It’s a strong reminder of how, after the film ends, the people in it will continue as they always have, trying to adapt and survive.

Rich Hill trailer