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In 1991, Fred Isseks, a teacher at Middletown High School in upstate New York, grew a bit tired of teaching Romeo and Juliet.
Looking to pique students’ curiosity, especially those not necessarily interested in school’s routine offerings, Isseks created a pioneering elective: an audiovisual course called Electronic English.
Early on, students shot music videos and kung fu clips in the free-form gatherings. The class and the students evolved when they embarked on a highly transformative project. Led by Isseks, the teens morphed into investigative documentary journalists, putting elected officials, major corporations and even Mafia crime families on notice for their roles in a wide-ranging cover-up of the dumping of toxic waste at a local landfill, which sat atop a regional aquifer and threatened the health and safety of the surrounding community.
The 2025 documentary Middletown, which showed at the Milwaukee Film Festival, revisits the investigations three decades later with archival camcorder footage preserved by Isseks.
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Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the filmmaking duo behind the documentary franchise Boys State (2020) and Girls State (2024), directed the film. They intertwine grainy footage shot by the students with interviews with Isseks and a group of classmates now well into middle age as they revisit their films and confront the legacy of the experience, both on them personally and for their collective community.
From 1991 to 1997, the students made four films, including the hour-long Garbage, Gangsters and Greed, which focused on the vast conspiracy involving the toxic waste that was poisoning their city, located in New York’s Hudson Valley region.
The students ruffled the feathers of many, including a seemingly disinterested editor of their hometown newspaper, who reacted angrily when confronted about the lack of coverage of the issue, even after being presented with the students’ video that showed evidence of toxic landfill contamination.
Two of Isseks’ former students featured in the film, Jeffrey Dutemple and Rachel Raimist, pursued careers in the media and have found success, as a cinematographer and a director respectively. Raimist, a shy punk rocker who admitted to spending considerable time hanging out in the school’s parking lot before finding motivation in the Electronic English offering, and the self-proclaimed poser Dutemple credits Isseks and his class for setting them on their respective career paths.
The quirky Isseks, referred to by some as “hippie Fred” and who is now in his 70s, comes off as the hero of Middletown. He retired from teaching in 2011 but remains a Middletown resident. Isseks’ classroom was recreated for the documentary, much to the amazement of him and his students, who came together for the film in what was, at times, highly emotional as they reflected on the project and the impact it had on their lives.
Isseks appeared at the April 26 showing of the documentary at the Oriental Theatre for a Q&A session and was greeted with a standing ovation.
“Since this film came out, I’ve been up to my neck in film festivals, and I love it,” Isseks said.
Reuniting with many of his former students as a result of the documentary has been profound for Isseks. “It’s been a wonderful experience. It’s kind of like a dream.”
Isseks said that about a decade ago he decided that he needed to do something with a massive collection of VHS tapes produced by his students and stored in his house. “Either throw them out or digitize them, so I digitized them all thinking that someday this was all going to be relevant again,” he said.
Isseks was right.
After freelance writer Geoff Manaugh did a piece on the class, Isseks got a call from Rise Films, and the documentary began to take shape.
The students weren’t the only ones who received an education in his class.
“I learned so much from them,” Isseks said. “Real education is a two-way street. We learn as much from our students and they learn from us. What made the project so wonderful is that we were all learning at the same time. We all felt that we were on to something and that we were doing it as a group. That’s important in education. A lot of that has been lost through standardization and reliance on testing and competition.”
