There’s a moment early on in the new documentary The Great Experiment where the camera lingers on several people asleep on a bus. It feels at once nostalgic and quietly unsettling—peaceful, but also distant, untouchable. The images recall those of the photographer Robert Frank, when he undertook a cross-country road trip in the late 1950s, for the landmark photo book The Americans.
In The Great Experiment, filmmakers Eric Daniel Metzgar and Steve Maing, along with a team of collaborators and videographers, turn their lens on America in the years between 2017 and 2021, during the first Trump administration. The title borrows from George Washington’s description of democracy as “our last great experiment.” Rather than imposing a heavy interpretive frame, the film observes, assembling fragments of a country in motion and trusting the viewer to find their own through line.
“That space in between is where the curiosity is located,” Maing told the INDY. “That’s where openness, in place of judgment, occurs. That’s where the magic of cinema happens. Where people are invited to participate in watching a film, and to consider that maybe there’s another way of engaging with the world.”
Much like Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary High School, which unfolds over the course of a day at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, The Great Experiment resists narration in favor of presence. It watches closely, letting contradictions sit side by side, unresolved.
Ahead of the documentary’s screening at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival this year, the INDY spoke with Metzgar and Maing about resisting explanation, holding tension, and what it means to document a country still in the middle of becoming itself. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: The film resists easy judgment at a moment when people often feel pressure to take sides. How did you think about honesty in storytelling when honesty itself can feel polarizing?
STEVE MAING: We began this film as an attempt to really make sense of a moment. This was a moment when people were seeing their neighbors as enemies and thinking of shared spaces as kind of contested battlegrounds.
What we wanted to do was memorialize this time … really as parents: What do we want our kids to be able to see and understand about this time one day? And to do that spatially, we kind of abandoned the idea that America is broken up into a Left and a Right and embraced the idea that it’s a more complex place. That it is an intersection of many different experiences.
ERIC DANIEL METZGAR: As we were editing, we had a million conversations about not agreeing with something, or feeling like something had an inflammatory quality, but ultimately feeling like “It’s what someone in this country thinks.”
And it’s bumping up against something very contrary in the next scene. We wanted to allow a forum where an audience gets to see the diversity of what Americans think, say, and do, and not editorialize it too much.
You’ve described the film as an act of witnessing more than explaining. What drew you to that approach?
METZGAR: We both appreciate vérité films that are strictly observational, where you’re allowed to be in a space without someone telling you what to think or how to feel. One of the main goals was to create a document of what life was like so future generations could get a sense of what it really felt like to be there, rather than have a filmmaker editorializing.
MAING: We’re told far too often what the analysis is, how to think and feel. And that’s a muscle we don’t really get to exercise enough. Making a film where people are invited to arrive at their own critical assessment of things—that was something we really cared about.
There’s no narration guiding the audience. What do you feel like you gained by stepping back that way?
METZGAR: The scenes start to build a cumulative weight. It stops being about having a full comprehension of every scene and instead creates this feeling of simultaneity. Like you’re in one space in America, meanwhile this is happening, meanwhile this is happening. We started to feel a power in moving from place to place rather than explaining any one place.
MAING: Every time you’re thrust into a new situation, you’re learning something, and then you bring that to the next scene. By the end, the hope is you’ve become more attuned to human information and less focused on rehashing a political narrative.
The visuals feel almost discovered rather than constructed. How did you decide what to shoot?
METZGAR: The film really evolved over the years. We didn’t start knowing we were going to film for so long. Sometimes we were tracking the news, sometimes less so. Sometimes it was about access. We had collaborators we trusted in different parts of the country. And sometimes it was instinct. Like, it’d be good to be in a barbershop, a school, a town hall, the eclipse.
MAING: We were trying to trust our instincts about what wasn’t being covered. To look slightly to the left or right of the main narrative being fed to us. To decenter that and recenter unexpected voices and experiences.
How did you navigate trust with the people you filmed?
METZGAR: Transparency. Just telling people what we’re doing. That we’re making a portrait of the country. There aren’t interviews; we’re not going to editorialize. What we film will be what’s on the screen. Some people said no, but most were open.
MAING: Most people feel like they’re not seen or heard. It’s pretty rare that people don’t want to share something.
You spend years immersed in these stories, and the film leaves us with a quiet but urgent question about whether the experiment can endure. Where did you land personally? Did the process leave you with hope, uncertainty, or something more complicated?
METZGAR: I don’t know if there’s a yes-or-no answer. Will the experiment endure? I think whatever happens, it’s being tested right now. The edges, the boundaries, the container. Yeah, it’s all being tested. Can this plurality work? Can it withstand corruption at this level?
For me, that was the goal of the film, that we sensed this was a potential breaking point and to document it so that, whichever way it went, there would be a record. Either of the system holding together despite the challenges, or … a document of democracy crumbling, and what it felt like on the ground while it happened. But ultimately, I’m optimistic. We filmed with people across all these spectrums, and give or take a few dark instances, I found that I could relate and find common ground with a lot of people.
I don’t agree with them politically, and I have huge misgivings and outrage about this administration, but in terms of people living their lives, I felt there was decency in most everyone we filmed with. And that gave me hope that people do want to help each other, protect each other. We filmed around emergencies like fires and floods, and even though it didn’t all make it into the film, I saw people come together.
METZGAR: We’re approaching the country’s 250th anniversary, and at the same time living through a moment where people feel really deep levels of destabilization … a kind of erosion of democratic ideals.
There’s this idea of a divided or fractured America that gets narrativized constantly. And there’s a lot to contend with. I think one of the takeaways I arrived at is that we’re in a very complex moment, and complex problems don’t have easy solutions. They may not even have solutions. But we are a country that has to learn to live with each other.
How do we start with the basics? Accepting the moment we’re in. Accepting each other. Accepting that there are people who have a radically different experience than yours and asking what we can build from there. There’s this idea in parenting that really stuck with me, and that is that it’s not the mistakes that define the relationship. It’s what you do after. When things go off the rails, how do you repair? How do you reconnect, deescalate, and try to have the conversation again? Maybe that’s one of the most basic places to start.
The Great Experiment will also be screened at the River Run International Film Festival in Greensboro on April 19.
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