The NYT Op-Docs series is always excellent, but this one was really a doozy for me. In Summer’s Choice, by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, “a talented teenager in the Mojave Desert is torn between ​​​her goal of attending art school and wanting to help support her family.” Let’s take a look at why this piece hit me so hard right in the feels.

In the first act, the rugged landscape and the harsh circumstances of Summer’s life set the stage for the narrative that’s about to unfold. It’s already clear that this is a small story that speaks to much bigger ideas. “People whose lives represent a larger significance,” as Gay Telese said in Telling True Stories. Several themes emerge in these first three minutes: life in rural America, poverty, education, struggle, and the importance of family.

The cinematography is simple but beautiful. A lot of handheld verité shots and some locked-off landscapes. Lou Pepe avoids fancy camera moves, instead settling into well-composed frames and allowing the characters to create the movement within them. It can be hard to be so patient and let the action unfold like that. Later there are a few slider shots (5:35 and 6:52), but they are always very slow and subtle. Also note that we never see a head shot of the interview we are listening to.

At 2:55, the titular unanswered question is presented: What will Summer do with her future? Watching this academic counseling scene, I was really struck by the level of access these filmmakers had. Many of us have been struggling to “strike the deal” with the subjects of our winter projects, so we know how hard it can be to both find a subject with a compelling story, and then to convince that subject to let you be in their space with a camera for days or weeks. I’d love to learn how they found this story and negotiated such access.

At 3:53 is another great example of framing the shot and letting the action unfold. Seemingly nothing happens in this 16-second-long shot, and yet, it’s a beautiful, quiet moment that shows instead of tells us more about what Summer’s life is like. The following sequence reveals details about her pre-dawn school commute without ever hearing her say a word about it.

I’d also like to know more about how they recorded the verité sound, especially the meeting at 5:35. I don’t see any lav mics, so I suspected a boom pole, but it seems like it was a very small crew. Looking again, I think it could all be an on-camera shotgun mic and good ol’ fashioned standing-close-to-your-subject.

At 7:38, the story starts to conclude with the news that Summer will not graduate on time. It’s a heart-breaking revelation after we’ve come to empathize so much with this character. The juxtaposition of exuberance and disappointment in the scene of the boy graduating at 8:15 is very powerful.

At 9:00 Summer shares a thought that straddles both ends of the Ladder of Abstraction when she makes a connection between about how she prefers to draw in pen and her philosophy of life: “If you can’t erase something, just make it better.” It is a small detail that also offers us a much bigger idea to reflect upon. May we all be so lucky to find such poetic interview subjects.