Riotsville, U.S.A

Welcome to Riotsville, a fictional town built by the US military in the 60s as a training ground to equip troops against future civil disobedience. Looking like a cheap movie set, Riotsville is inhabited by soldiers playing hippies and rebels, and exists only to be burnt down again and again – with every angle of the simulated chaos filmed and studied in minute detail. In her phenomenal and purely archival collage of absurd, ridiculous and terrifying clips from the military’s own archives and from public TV, filmmaker Sierra Pettengill explores the relationship between state and citizen and shows how the mechanisms of power end up reproducing the violence and unrest they were put in place to prevent. Riotsville, USA is an essay film crafted with furious nerve that may be grounded in the past but has an eye trained on our fraught, over-policed present.