One Road To Quartzsite

description

A menagerie of snowbirds, crustpunks and libertarians make their annual winter pilgrimage to an unassuming freeway exit. They become unlikely neighbours on the same piece of dirt — all trying to live free and not die.

It’s late fall in a sleepy desert town in Arizona. Over the course of a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of snowbirds, trumpheads, rockhounds, retirees, crustpunks, homeschoolers, widows, loners and fugitives all descend upon Quartzsite, Arizona. They set up camps, intermingle, and an unlikely community is formed somewhere between the death and pinnacle of the American Dream. The cinema vérité documentary feels like a single winter season, from the influx of campers in November to everyone scattering by March: just another season in All-American purgatory.

OFFICIAL SELECTION
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2022
Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2022
Cleveland International Film Festival 2022
Milwaukee Film Festival 2022
Chattanooga Film Festival 2022

DIRECTOR'S BIO
Ryan Maxey has a fondness for ordinary people and unapologetic heroes in his documentaries — which express themes of loneliness, moral conundrum, and upheaval of the status quo. ONE ROAD TO QUARTZSITE is his debut feature length film. As director, six of his short films have been selected as Vimeo Staff Picks — and have been featured by SXSW, Hot Docs, True/False, AFI Docs, Outfest, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Dazed and Confused Magazine. His 2019 short, HOW TO MAKE A RAINBOW received the Audience Award at Outfest that same year.