A Fun Summer Of Bullies and Ritalin

In the summer of 2003, filmmakers Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price joined forces to tackle a documentary subject of almost unbearably powerful emotions and compulsively watchable conflict: a season at a Midwestern sleepover camp. For three weeks, Mr. Beesley and Ms. Price used their cameras to corral the experiences of 90 children, ages six to 15, turned loose on a camp in northern Wisconsin into "Summercamp!," a marvelously honest new film opening today at IFC Center.

"There are so many inherent dramas when you get that many kids together," Mr. Beesley said. "Some of them are away from home for the first time." Luckily, the owners of Swift Nature Camp and the parents of most of the children attending agreed to give the filmmakers the access they needed. "There was literally no budget," Mr. Beesley said. "We just showed up and spent our credit cards on whatever we needed to."

The filmmakers also operated wi th no preconceptions. While acknowledging that the "confined and finite" qualities of a summer camp season suggested "a built-in story," all they really had to go on was their documentary experience and memories of their own camp tenures.

After about three days of shooting, Mr. Beesley and Ms. Price's cameras found a group of children who would occupy the center of their digital, hand-held tapestry of sing-alongs, canoeing, and s'mores.

Or rather, the kids found them. "They were okay having us hang around with them," Ms. Price said of the five boys and five girls who became the core cast of "Summercamp!" The film's two stars are Holly, a charismatically energetic and wistful girl, and Cameron, an overweight kid with an unusual flair for challenging counselors' patience and making enemies among his peers.

Holly and Cameron "are our main characters because they related more to adults and adult-type issues and they didn't have a whole lot of friends within their cabins," Mr. Beesley said. The filmmakers give Holly a chance to speak her mind and eventually open her heart in a way that she likely hasn't before or since.

"Summercamp!" also doggedly follows Cameron down a road of trials littered with obstacles of the boy's own devising. Cameron has an unfortunate genius for clumsily rebellious behavior; witnessing his steady failures and occasional triumphs will likely empower the inner outcast in anyone. "We're watching two kids go through growing pains and be open enough about it to sort of let us discover and experience it while they do," Ms. Price said.

Something else the filmmakers discovered was how much prescription medication has permeated children's lives. "There was this group of kids going to the nurse's office every night," Ms. Price said. "It took us a few days to catch on to what was going on." Per their parent's wishes, campers diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and other behavioral maladies were reporting to receive their prescribed meds. Images in "Summercamp!" of what appear to be perfectly healthy children lining up to swallow pills like the mental patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest" are disturbing; at the same time, a scene in which one boy flirts with a girl by bragging about the magnitude of his ADD is hilarious.

Though Ms. Price and Mr. Beesley divided up the photography on the basis of camper gender, they crossed paths constantly. "Cameron would come running out of the woods and I knew that we were following him," Ms. Price said. "I'd pick him up for a while and then he would drift off and I would go back to the girls. It was great because our filmmaking started dovetailing." It was also, she said, "very, very exhausting. The kids are just insane, I mean their energy is nuts. We were up before they were and within hours we were panting and needing naps."

Beginning today at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).