Down Home
2023 · 12m · USA
Directed by Riley Engemoen
Genres: documentary
A documentary portrait of a summer camp in Elgin, Texas where adults with developmental disabilities dance, love, and live freely.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Engemoen shoots with the kind of patience that trusts his subjects completely — twelve minutes of unguarded human warmth.
Camp for adults with developmental disabilities, refusing the inspirational framing — restraint is the right ethical move here, and the description suggests Engemoen actually achieves it.
Refusing the inspirational-disability framing and just letting the camera sit with unfiltered joy at a Texas summer camp is the entire structural ethics of the film — Crip Camp adjacent, but smaller, quieter, and unbroken by argument. The right kind of restraint.