What American Graffiti and Breakfast Club and other movies have done in fiction, American Teen does in a documentary –and rather more powerfully. Director Nanette Burstein spent a year at the high school in Warsaw, Indiana, following around members of the senior class. Eventually narrowing her focus of the 1200 hours of film she shot onto five students–Megan the bitchy princess, Colin the jock, Jake the invisible man, Hannah the creative offbeat girl, and Mitch, the regular guy–Burstein finds amazing drama in the most ordinary events. Perhaps the most poignant subject is Hannah, a creative free spirit who is really out-of-step with the herd. The saddest moment in the film comes when her mother, a woman who suffers from manic depression, warns Hannah not to follow her dreams and go to San Francisco. “You’re not always going to get exactly what you want,” her mom says, “You’re not special.” There is bitter wisdom in mom’s words–almost none of us is that special–but what the audience has learned is that this girl does in fact a lot of special qualities. Hannah’s efforts to find out who she is in the midst of this less-than-nuturing environment is a creation myth disguised as reality. We were fortunate to see American Teen at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville NY, and three of the kids–Colin, Megan and Mitch, pictured above–were on hand to take questions. They seemed poised and much more mature than they did in the film, which was shot just two years ago. All three expressed the apparently but not exactly conflicting ideas that they all felt unbelievable pressure in high school, while believing now that spent an amazing amount of time worrying about insignifica. Mitch had a thoughtful reaction to seeing the film, one worth pondering by all people of all ages: “You wonder why you isolated youself from so many people.”