Part of Winter 1994
In his first feature, L.A. based filmmaker William Jones explores what it’s like to grow up gay in small town America. Beginning with a voyage back to Massillion, Ohio, the filmmaker’s hometown, Jones recounts autobiographical stories against the background of empty Midwestern landscapes. This slow contemplative reflection is disrupted by a Christian Fundamentalist tirade and the film shifts into an examination of the language and laws describing and controlling (homo)sexuality. A sense of the history of laws, words, and customs informs a meditation on the interaction of the personal and the social. Massillon is an exploration of the unsettling stories that often lurk behind benign landscapes and suggests that childhood experiences are not as innocent as they seem.