Nellie Kluz's THE DELLS (2024) - West Coast premiere with director in person!
Nellie Kluz's feature debut is a keenly perceptive doc that captures the friction between the American dream and reality through the lives of international student workers.
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Apr 29, 2025, 8:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA
THE DELLS
directed by Nellie Kluz
2024, U.S., 72m, DCP
West Coast premiere followed by a conversation with director Nellie Kluz
Presented with MEMORY.
doors/bar: 7:30
film: 8:00
The first feature by nonfiction filmmaker Nellie Kluz is a beautifully observed vérité portrait of tourism and labor in the American Midwest, seen through the lives of international students in Wisconsin Dells – the self-described “Waterpark Capital of the World”. Each summer, groups of students travel abroad to the Dells for a State Department visa program that promises an immersion into American society and culture; yet working minimum-wage jobs exposes them to the wealth gap, American kitsch, and other day-to-day realities of making ends meet in a major tourist hub. Taking a roving perspective among dozens of subjects, THE DELLS is a soberly funny snapshot of a young generation full of optimism in spite of a precarious reality.
A MEMORY release. Special thanks to Riel Roch-Decter.
“[Kluz depicts] a counter-intuitively funny ensemble of people (not least the filmmaker) finding humor in a default hopeless place.” -Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker Magazine
Official Selection: 2024 Visions du Réel, New/Next Film Festival