Free event. Seating is limited.

The Center for Rural Engagement, IU Cinema, and Brown County Playhouse present Monrovia, Indiana.

Forty-six million Americans live in rural, small-town America. These towns were once the backbone of American life. While their number and populations have shrunk, it is important acknowledge the unique and key contributions small towns make to American character and culture, in addition to providing most of our food, raw materials, and drinking water. Rural America is also a formative center of American politics and values.

Monrovia, Indiana explores a small town in mid-America, and illustrates how values like community service, duty, spiritual life, generosity, and authenticity are formed, experienced, and lived along with conflicting stereotypes. The film gives a complex and nuanced view of daily life in Monrovia and provides some understanding of a way of life whose influence and force have not always been recognized or understood in the big cities on the east and west coasts of America and in other countries. Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman discovered Monrovia during his 2017 visit to IU Cinema as part of its Filmmaker to Filmmaker: Conversations from the Director’s Chair series.

(2018, Directed by Frederick Wiseman, Unrated documentary, 143 min.)