In the Air

April works in a scrap yard. Daphany waits for customers at the drive-thru window of a fast food restaurant. Lee spends his time longing for the school day to end. The local Cirque D’Art circus school is their only escape from the daily tedium and checked-out adults. In the Air combines documentary and fictional elements to render the portrait of a place that has been enduring an economic crisis for decades: Portsmouth in southeastern Ohio, the filmmaker’s native city. The film shows real people re-enacting scenes from everyday life, and thus conveys the force they are capable of in a deindustrialized world – performed in a striking collective choreography to Alice DeeJay’s song Better Off Alone.