Pearblossom Hwy (2012)

"What else am I? What else can I say? I'm a troublemaker," says Cory, one of the three protagonists, directly into the camera. The other protagonists are Anna, an illegal immigrant from Japan who is selling her body to make money to get back home, and Jeff, Cory's homophobic brother, a former soldier who now lives day-to-day. In the style of New Wave filmmakers, the director draws on sensitive moments from actors' lives (meeting your father for the first time, a grandmother sick on another continent), so it's never clear whether we are watching reconstructed reality or the director's vision. Ott warns that his film is about the abandoned youth in America's small towns and the fallacy of the American Dream, and--most importantly--the truth that lies somewhere in that porous threshold between fact and fiction.