Because ‘Happy Campers’ Avoids Grandstanding, It Is a Political Film in Only the Best Sense 

The blessing of ‘Happy Campers’ is how it deflates elite opinion. While Amy Nicholson’s documentary is a barefaced meditation on the inequities of capitalism, it is also an homage to the indomitability of the human spirit.

Via Grasshopper Film
Kim Smalls in 'Happy Campers.' Via Grasshopper Film

Few things narrow aesthetic reward more thoroughly than politics. The byways through which works of art are created and how they are experienced can be stunted — not irrevocably but to distressing effect — by ideologies of any stripe. The free-standing authority by which a novel or a poem or a painting or a film thrives depends on its ability to transcend circumstance. The latter is telling, but it is not the end-all and be-all of art.

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