Event

Red, White & Wasted

Wed Jul 10: 8.00pm
Thu Jul 11: 8.00pm

Sam Jones & Andrei Bowden Schwartz
US
2019
1h 29m
Series - Visiting Artists
Visiting Artist
** Director Sam B. Jones will be in attendance! **

About
Mudding: its just something people do in Florida. You get your friends, your beer, and your truck, and you drive through the mud until you cant see the paint. If you know where to look, you can find people mudding everywhere in Florida even right behind SeaWorld. Swamp Ghost is the last real mudhole in Orlando, and thats where we meet Video Pat. Pat has devoted his life to filming trucks at the mudhole and practically raised his daughters Krista and Jessi out there. But when Swamp Ghost goes up in flames, Pat loses everything. Theres nowhere left to go.

As Pat deals with the fallout, we and Pat begin to understand that Swamp Ghost had a dark side, and his obsession with mudding has had a profound affect on his family. Kristas unplanned pregnancy and Jessis drug and health issues threaten the fragile family unit as they try to get back into the mud. Theyre not alone in that goal available land is disappearing all across Florida, so mudders flock to the Redneck Yacht Club: a huge event that attracts tens of thousands to a weekend long redneck Mardi Gras. Unable to find a new mudhole in Orlando, Pat leaves the family behind and heads south to RYC.

After his initial excitement, Pat begins to find the new paradigm of mudding a shocking contrast to the backwoods community he knew at Swamp Ghost. RYC is expensive, dangerous, misogynist, racist, and politically charged. Its a drunken dystopia of white male freedom: freedom from laws, from responsibility, and from the other. Pat finds it overwhelming and alienating. Back in Orlando, he is finally able to accept that his heyday is over and discard his identity as Video Pat. He turns his focus away from mudding and towards taking care of his daughters and Kristas new baby. Country folks can survive, Pat tells us, even if things can never go back to the way they were. Pats hopes are kept alive by the idea the baby will carry on the heritage of mudding though perhaps thats not such a good thing.