Having had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, Sean Dunne's "Oxyana" will be taking the self-distribution route and will be made available for digital rental or download on oxyana.com starting July 1st. The documentary is the feature-length debut from the "American Juggalo" filmmaker, who won the prize for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca. The film looks at the coal mining town of Oceana, West Virginia, which is currently being ravaged by Oxycontin addiction, exploring the prescription pill epidemic through interviews with the residents. "I was thinking a lot about 'Harlan County, USA' by Barbra Koppel and 'Vernon, Florida' by Errol Morris when we decided to make this film," Dunne told Indiewire ahead of the film's Tribeca debut. Take a look at the trailer below:...
- 6/26/2013
- by Alison Willmore
- Indiewire
Oxyana is not a story about redemption. The feature-length documentary from director Sean Dunne, who brought us the most revealing look at a maligned subculture with his mini-doc, American Juggalo, is just about as bleak as it gets. With content this heavy, Oxyana might have been in danger of feeling preachy, melodramatic, or even agenda-driven, if put in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. However, as he did with Juggalo, Dunne lends a truly objective yet compassionate eye to the proceedings, allowing his subjects to speak for themselves. The self-portrait they paint is stunning, harsh, evocative, and, at the risk of sounding cynical, nearly devoid of hope. Oceana, West Virginia is a coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains. It's a tiny place with a small,...
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- 5/2/2013
- Screen Anarchy
Oceana, a small coal mining town in Wyoming County, West Virginia, is, on the surface, like any other small town in Appalachia. An hour away from almost any major city, and with an approximate population of 1,400, it’s small, close-knit and not necessarily very open to outsiders. But quietly simmering underneath the surface of this municipality, an insidious epidemic is growing; a scourge of OxyContin and prescription pills that has devastated the town and given it the unfortunate nickname of “Oxyana.” Directed by Sean Dunne (the helmer behind Emmy-nominated documentary short “The Archive” and the Insane Clown Posse Juggalos documentary “American Juggalo”), “Oxyana” is a gripping and sometimes hard-to-watch portrait of this struggling township under siege by a drug epidemic. Dispassionate in the best sense of the word, “Oxyana” is respectful to the point of being detached. Aside from some hauntingly broken down music by members of Deer Tick (which resembles the wailing.
- 4/28/2013
- by Rodrigo Perez
- The Playlist
Oceana, West Virginia used to thrive via the coal mining industry. It was a town where you could leave your door open to your house overnight and wake up knowing you were safe. Then things changed as the coal business began to decline. In response, the town eventually became the epicenter for Oxycontin abuse, resulting in a population largely of addicts. As doctors over-prescribed the drug, an industry was born when the only viable way to make money outside of the coal industry was to deal Oxy. Director Sean Dunne’s visceral documentary Oxyana, what many have nicknamed the town, is composed of a series of interviews with Oceana inhabitants – the overwhelming majority of them addicted to Oxy – and it doesn’t shy away from anything. Addicts of all ages are filmed snorting and injecting Oxy, they are filmed getting high, they are filmed coming down. They’re filmed smoking cigarettes inches away from their babies’ faces...
- 4/19/2013
- by Caitlin Hughes
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Between 2008 and 2011, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Sean Dunne built a burgeoning reputation for himself with a series of short films that demonstrated both his strong visual sense and his ability to skilfully capture the world of his subjects. The standout films from this period were The Archive, a portrait of the largest collection of vinyl records in the U.S. and its owner, and American Juggalo, which featured devoted Insane Clown Posse fans at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Now Dunne has broadened his focus and made his debut feature, Oxyana, which zeroes in on the town of Oceana, …...
- 4/19/2013
- by Nick Dawson
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
For some years now, I have been a big fan of the work of Sean Dunne, whose shortform documentaries are not only intelligent and compassionate but also visually accomplished and highly cinematic. Anyone looking to get a sense of Dunne’s talent should check out The Archive, his 2008 debut, or American Juggalo, which he put out last year. (To see all of his work, go to Dunne’s Vimeo page.)
Given my admiration for his shorts, I was very excited yesterday to receive an email from Dunne about the new project he’s working on: Oxyana, his debut feature. He wrote, “I truly believe in the power of good filmmaking. It can make a real difference, I’ve seen that with my other films. I think this is an important film and one that will entertain and enlighten.”
The synopsis for the film — which will be shot by Dunne’s regular d.
Given my admiration for his shorts, I was very excited yesterday to receive an email from Dunne about the new project he’s working on: Oxyana, his debut feature. He wrote, “I truly believe in the power of good filmmaking. It can make a real difference, I’ve seen that with my other films. I think this is an important film and one that will entertain and enlighten.”
The synopsis for the film — which will be shot by Dunne’s regular d.
- 5/24/2012
- by Nick Dawson
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Every August, jobs are quit across the nation, spray paint cans cracked open and bras ripped off, as the juggalos and jugalettes of America descend on the woods of Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, for the Gathering of the Juggalos, a glorious week of "titties, weed and fast food." Juggalos, for the uninitiated, are a distinct subgroup: they love the Insane Clown Posse, paint their faces, drink Faygo and like to fight. They're also mocked widely for all of the above, an animosity that fuels their sense of community and constant proclamations of how much they love each other. Theirs is a family, they insist, widely dispersed, and they reunite every year at Cave-In Rock for a deranged version of Thanksgiving. This Tila Tequila warzone is the backdrop for director Sean Dunne's documentary "American Juggalo," a quick, interview-driven look at the questionable behavior of our very own Chavs.
Witness the heavily pregnant...
Witness the heavily pregnant...
- 9/27/2011
- by The Huffington Post
- Huffington Post
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