We Were the Scenery (Radcliff, 2025)

There are few things we feel more nostalgia about or idealize quite as much as the movies of our youth.

I have been on a handful of movie sets, so I know that the reality of making a movie is often quite different from what the uninformed imagine it to be. There are long hours, repeated takes, and a lot of stress. There is, inevitably, a lot of waiting. Because the process can be tedious at times, extra care is given to proritize the needs of those being paid the most, which means that extras experience the delays and waiting in even greater measure. But the reward is a life-changing experience…right? Who wouldn’t hold onto the fact that he or she made some small contribution to a work of art that greatly impacted so many others?

Well, actually…how frequently do you think about that temp job you had decades ago?

We Were the Scenery chronicles a Vietnamese couple who were extras in Apocalypse Now. The word “nostalgia” imples a mix of sadness and pleasure, and it is not so much that they are sad watching the VHS tape of the movie as that their doing so evokes a little sadness in us. We would like to think the artistic significance of the movie woudl inform the experience, yet their memories are … ordinary. They name the various extras who appear in the scenes they watch, but these are bits of trivia with no real significance. Being in the movie simply did notg impact them the same way watching it impacted us.

At fifteen minutes, the short film can do little more than gesture at the significance of the couple’s memories or what sort of ruminations they are expected to prompt in viewers. But for those who have ever loved a movie, there can never be too many stories about its creation, even small ones about who contirbuted in minor ways. After all, when a film is perfect, every small detail about its making gets invested with an a sense of importance. The things we forget sometimes have a great impact on others, and the things we do that make the largest impact on others are sometimes only minor scenes in the story of our own life.

We Were the Scenery is part of the 2026 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The festival will conclude on Sunday, April 19, 2026.