In her latest film, “Happy Campers,” documentarian Amy Nicholson focuses on a camping community in Virginia that was torn down by developers. This “shabby Shangri-La” was a place where working-class people could find respite and friendship. Her film highlights this because she was a part of that community.
“I wandered in there one day, taking photographs, and I thought, ‘Wow, this looks like a lot of fun,’ but it was wintertime,” Nicholson explained. “I went back many years later in the summer, and when I saw it, full of people and full of life, I just fell in love with it. So I moved in.”
One of the things Nicholson wanted to highlight in her documentary was the way people at the campground formed friendships. She does this in the movie by showing the relationships between the people rather than through interview after interview asking people to talk about their experiences.
“I don’t sleep very much because I have these epiphanies in the middle of the night, and that was one of them,” Nicholson said. “Seriously, we had a whole film cut with the interviews. I did extensive interviews with 15 people, and they were all people who had either been there a long time or were sort of like the center of their section of the campground.”
But eventually, Nicholson continued, she realized that simply showing people talking wasn’t enough.
“You should be able to feel it,” she said. “So if we can’t make you feel it, we shouldn’t do it. We went back through all of our footage. We just wanted you to feel how fun and great and neighborly it was.”
Typically, Nicholson and her husband live in the Big Apple, so their time at the campground was a break from the pace of the city.
“I live in New York City, and it is a constant barrage of consumption,” she said. “Every day, a giant Amazon truck and a Fresh Direct truck and 6 million messengers come to everyone’s door and deliver all the things that people have to have.”
She returned to the city right at the start of the COVID lockdowns and immediately noticed a difference between the two worlds.
“Coming back to New York after just being so at ease and not thinking about what I had or not, not worrying about what everybody else thought about what I had,” she recalled. ” I missed thinking, ‘No, one’s gonna look at me funny if I say, hey, we have leftover milk. Do you want it? We’re going home for the week.’ You know, just really simple things like that. The non-judgmental part of it was so huge.”
While documentary filmmaking is often done to highlight a story that others may not be familiar with or to amplify the voices of those who aren’t always heard, the filmmakers often learn something themselves during the process of creating the film.
Nicholson spoke of this in her own work.
“I always fall in love with the people in my films,” shes said. “I sort of feel like you can’t make the film unless you’re in love with them. In this case, there were so many people, and they were all very different. I mean, yes, everyone was sort of in the same socioeconomic class, but, as people, completely different. I always say, I would give the movie back to have the place back. The feeling of being there was so great, and I hope I carry what they gave me with me for a long time.”
For more information on the documentary, including where to watch it, you can visit happycampers.film.
