film

Another top pick from Filmoteca's Ross Brothers retrospective, which forms part of the current Americana Film Festival, 45365 is an intimate, quietly observational portrait of life in the small American town of Sidney, Ohio, the zip code of which gives the film its name. Unfolding over the course of a year, this unobstrusively shot documentary's focus drifts between residents: teenagers hanging out in parking lots, police officers on late-night patrol, families gathering, couples arguing and strangers passing time in bars and diners. 

Through these fragments, the brothers build a textured picture of the tenderness and loneliness of small-town America – a trick they are clear world leaders at. Its loose structure and empathetic eye anticipate the filmmakers’ later work – including Gasoline Rainbow – treating ordinary lives with a sense of understated cinematic poetry.