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Filmmaker Lance Oppenheim was 22 when he first visited the Villages, America’s largest retirement village, with the intent to make a college thesis film about the place.

Instead, it morphed into a feature-length documentary and a spectacular directing debut, titled Some Kind of Heaven.

This isn’t the place that comes to mind when we think about the average retirement village – it’s a whole other world.

Vox describes the film as “equal parts dark comedy, loving character study, and suburban melodrama, it’s visually startling, funny, and moving”.

The film follows four subjects, navigating this “Disney World for retirees”.

There’s Reggie, who is spending his retirement experimenting with psychedelics, and his long-suffering wife, Anne, Barbara, whose husband died is looking for love.

Dennis, who is living out of a van while searching for a wealthier woman with whom he might strike up a relationship, also features.

Oppenheim follows his subjects over a few months, documenting their emotional and mental landscapes, and the surreal world of the Villages, where reality seems suspended.

In my mind, the Villages is a place where the reality that [you and I] belong to seemingly does not exist. They have their own newspaper that prints only the good news.

They have a radio station that only plays the hits from the ’50s and the ’60s. There’s this deliberate gulf that they’ve created between their world and ours. So I wanted to make a film that could speak not just narratively to that idea, but also stylistically, that could riff off the reality of the place and the reality distortion effects.

But, this isn’t fiction, and everything is real.

The trailer gives you a feel for the place and the documentary:

Gripping, right?

You can read Vox’s full interview with Oppenheim if you’re keen to know more about the behind the scenes action, and can watch Some Kind of Heaven on one of these video-on-demand platforms.

[source:vox]