Belfast, Maine

Director: Frederick Wiseman

1999 / 245min / 16mm

In the late 1990s, Wiseman, a longtime summertime resident of Northport, Maine, began a project of chronicling daily life in the nearby seaside town of Belfast, filming classes at the local high school, workers in the Stinson sardine cannery, lobstermen in the harbor, and everything in between. The resulting four-hour film captures both the scenic splendors of coastal New England and the hard facts of life among the city’s poor and working-class residents, presented without commentary in Wiseman’s lucid, observational style. Greeted with some angry walkouts at its 1999 premiere at Belfast’s Colonial Theatre from locals who’d expected blind boosterism, Wiseman’s epic of the everyday shows that true love of a place means not turning a blind eye to its flaws.