Teenage Wasteland, the new documentary by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, follows a band of high schoolers in upstate New York In the ‘90s, who, expose a toxic landfill threatening their own community.
Now reunited decades later, these former students wrestle with the legacy of their youthful investigation and how it shaped their lives.
Teenage Wasteland (formerly titled Middletown) premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was the Centerpiece selection of the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight program. It is set for a limited theatrical release beginning November 26, 2025, including a run at New York’s Film Forum.
A high school A/V assignment goes full-on activist when English teacher Fred Isseks sends students, armed with video recorders, on an investigative assignment to suss out the brown muck surfacing at the local dump in their upstate New York town. The toxicity they discover lives not only in the landfill, but in political corruption and environmental injustice in their community.
Archival footage of their 1996 class project, “Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed,” outtakes, diaries, and interviews with Fred and several students 30 years later weave a sobering yet buoyant story both timely and for the ages, about fighting the good fight as its own life-changing triumph.
In an interview at Sundance, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine described the inspiration behind the film, saying, “The inspiration behind the film was our discovery of the incredible documentary that Fred Isseks and his students at Middletown High School made in the mid-1990s called Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed.”
The film is the latest of Moss and McBaine’s many collaborations together following the 2020 Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize-winner Boys State, and film Girls State (2024).
Watch the official trailer for Teenage Wasteland above.
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