In Detroit: “[For so long we were told], stay in your house… no one knows anyone else. Used to be that we were afraid of the stranger,” explains a 30-something man as he stepped gingerly over the abandoned remains of his old elementary school. “People started leaving and the schools started emptying.”

The solution “is like a peanut butter cookie,” expounds a 20-something bakery owner in North Carolina who had lost her job and with no prospects for work opened a small bake- shop in her small town. “Peanut butter is sticky and you want your community to stick together, to grow strong.”

“More used to mean family and community,” says a young woman in Hawaii. “Then for too long more started to mean money.”

The Chu brothers give the viewer the opportunity to get to know the subjects of their film, returning to many of them a few times throughout the hour-long documentary. And so as we watch, we begin to worry about the Colorado rancher whose survival is tenuous at best. “If we make it life goes on,” he says. “If we don’t there will be a complete life-changing situation. We have 140 employees and all their families. The fallout of a facility like this is enormous.”

We are enthralled then confused by the religious discourse of an Amish farmer; intrigued by the lessons of a DC corporate executive who preaches Greek philosophy. We hear rap songs and poems delivered by school children who recant how the recession has infected their world and we fall in love with a modern day philosopher from Detroit. “Grace Lee Boggs. She is one of our favorites,” says Austin. “At around 90, she’s still fighting like she’s 25.” An Asian American, Boggs, who was married to an African American man with close ties to the Black Panthers, is at the heart of Detroit’s progress.

“This American revolution is going to be different from other revolutions,” she says, “because it is going to require giving up things rather than acquiring things. We’ve been consuming like crazy, we’ve been making money like crazy and… well, Humpty Dumpty.”

Detroit seems to be the beating heart of this very human movie, where so many of the lessons lie. “It seems like Detroit is ahead of the game in some ways because they’ve been living in these horrible, recession-like conditions for the past 30 or 40 years,” suggests Austin. “The people who left, left. The people who stayed want to make it a place to call home. That’s Boggs’ lesson. That’s how you save a community. It’s about bringing people back.” Boggs, herself, has lived in inner city Detroit for nearly half a century.

In their snapshot of America, the Chu’s don’t necessarily document the conditions of every state (though they did make their way through all 50), but they do share with the viewer what they themselves learned from the people they met. “There is a lot of wisdom from the older people … who lived through the [Great] Depression. We need to harvest their knowledge and use it,” says Austin. “We may not have learned what the formula is to save the country from economic disaster. But we did learn how to appreciate and how to be grateful. We learned generosity.”

Though the brothers laid out $15K to make the movie, including 6-months of full-time travel and 4 months of full-time editing, they say they are not looking to re-coup their expenses or make any money on the project. “We don’t want to charge people for the film,” says Austin. “Taking money from a recession film … that would be so wrong. Unlike Michael Moore who made 20-million dollars on his film, we don’t want to do something like that.” Moore’s film, Capitalism: A Love Story, was released in October 2009.

Of their 145 days on the road, during which they covered more than 30-thousand miles, Austin and Brian spent only 15 nights in their van. Strangers who had been laid off, who were already living in homes overcrowded with out-of-work friends and relatives invited the brothers in, gave them beds or couches and fed them. “We spent Valentine’s day with a man and his wife in Iowa,” Austin says, still awed by their hospitality. “They had been married for 40-plus years. She was making breakfast for us and then she gave him a Valentine’s card. ‘I’m the luckiest guy on earth,’ he told us. It was amazing.”

The on-line premiere of The Recess Ends begins this Sunday, January 17, 8pm EST, 5pm PST on justin.tv, an interactive internet medium.

On January 24th at 8pm EST, Austin and Brian will be available for a live, interactive conversation via justin.tv during the seconding airing of the film. Access the director’s cut through the following link to, The Recess Ends.

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