What
A cultural scavenger hunt about who Americans really are, which side of the road they’re on, and getting to the other side.
American Other is a documentary exploring group identity. We will investigate why, if and how Americans are different from one another.
How it All Works
Where are you, Joe?
The Beginning: We will start with a single interview. This interview will be of the most average American we can find. In other words we are going to find the Ordinary Joe, John Doe, Joe Sixpack or Joe Schmoe, a.k.a, T h e A v e r a g e J o e. Joe is an incredibly important interview, being the beginning of our journey though California. How do we find Joe? The same way we will find all of our interview subjects, with one small twist: , he is the only person to be interviewed that will be selected by the American Other production team. We’ve been crunching US census data, and have come up with some criteria for who Joe is based on national statistics (some examples, we will take the mean national income, or in the case of choosing between two major characteristics such as sex, we take the dominant group – so, our Average Joe is actually the Average Jane). Once we finish gathering all the characteristics of that first interview subject, we will track him (her) down using the same search method that will be applied for each and every interview we conduct; for more on our search method, please go to the others page where the process is outlined.
The Interviews: Once we locate Joe (or as previously, noted) Jane, we will conduct the interview. The American Other interview is a survey of
- ten questions -
crossing under
which will be exactly the same for each person we interview. The questions focus on getting each interviewee to discuss two aspects of their identity: what groups in the United States they identify with, feel connected to or part and what groups they are opposed to, disapprove of or alienated from. It will is this second set of groups, whom we call the “others,” that give the film gets it’s name, American Other. These groups will also make up the film’s path. For each group that is mentioned or pointed to as being an other, that will be where we go for our next interview. It’s a little bit like a game of telephone, as we create a conversation between people who are not ever actually in the same room with one another, and not might talk to each other, even if they were. This film is not about about conflict resolution, but about tracing which groups have conflict, and with whom. American Other will go into the divide between groups, weaving a pattern of connectivity out of disconnectivity. As we bounce from one persons other to the next, we hope to get to know Americans better than we did before, and to see if we are as different as we thought we were.
Post-production: This leg of the project will be a short film, using the state of California as microcosm and a test run for a full length, national project. We hope to have a completed pilot at the end of next summer, compiled from at least fifty interviews and footage of our travels to every region of California. 
Distribution: The end goal of this project is for Americans to get to know each other better. To this end, we hope to organize a series of screenings of the completed documentary in the very same locations where we traveled to during production. The target audience for this film is the same people who were interviewed, all of our others, and their extended community groups that they were representing when they were interviewed. We will have at least one screening in every major region that we visited while filming, hopefully bringing representatives of all the groups in the film into the same room for the first time. We also enter the short film into film festivals, TBD.