The Dells by Nellie Kluz

Production

Nellie Kluz, The Dells, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Nellie Kluz, The Dells, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Nellie Kluz, The Dells, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Tickets & Info

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Price $15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students on Fridays)

The self-described “Waterpark Capital of the World,” Wisconsin Dells is seared in the Midwest’s public imagination as a summer family vacation capital. Behind the stores and parks bringing these holidays to life, one can find many young adults from countries such as Turkey, Thailand, and Jamaica living in dormitories and making ends meet. Sponsored by the US State Department’s Summer Works Travel program, these J-1 visa students work long hours for low-paying jobs. The Dells follows an ensemble cast of “J-1s” working, partying, and cruising around the Wisconsin Dells as their youthful optimism for American luck brushes against their real-life experiences, in turn disappointing, humorous, and transcendent. 2024, US, DCP, in English, Turkish, and Spanish with English subtitles, 72 min.

A conversation with filmmaker Nellie Kluz and writer Lucy Schiller follows the screening on Friday, September 12.

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Bios

Nellie Kluz makes nonfiction films about collective rituals and the infrastructures that support them. Her films have screened at venues including Visions du Réel, Chicago Underground Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Maryland Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Anthology Film Archives, and others. She also works as a cameraperson for projects such as the HBO show How To with John Wilson, and has taught filmmaking at the California Institute of the Arts, New School, and University of Iowa.

Lucy Schiller is an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech University and a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review. Her other writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Adroit Review, Rustica, Cleveland Review of Books, Off Assignment, Paris Review Daily, West Branch, DIAGRAM, Speculative Nonfiction, Iowa Review, Lit Hub, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her book, on older age in the United States, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.