How the West Was Fun
2025 · 15m · United States
Directed by Sue Ding, Sarah Garrahan
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Visitors to Trail Dust Town, a Western theme park in Tucson, Arizona, explain what draws them to its romanticized version of the Old West.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing the theme-park-as-America essay right now, but Ding and Garrahan actually flip it—they let the visitors be *weird* about their desires instead of editorializing, which somehow makes the whole thing weirder and more honest than the expected takedown.
The restraint here is extraordinary; the filmmakers sit with their subjects' romanticisms without irony or intervention, letting the essay emerge through accumulation and juxtaposition in a lineage that traces back to Wiseman and recent work by filmmakers like Maxi Cohen—formally rigorous observation that trusts the audience.
The decision to let the camera hold on people's faces while they talk about myth and belonging, without cutting away or underlining with score, transforms what could've been a listicle into something genuinely intimate—that singular choice to honor the sincerity in the frame is everything.