AMERICAN TEEN is the touching and hilarious Sundance hit that follows the lives of five teenagers
- a jock, a popular girl, a heartthrob, an artsy girl and a geek – in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.

Filming daily for ten months, filmmaker Nanette Burstein (ON THE ROPES, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) developed a deep understanding of her subjects. The result is a film that goes beyond the enduring stereotypes of high school to reveal complex young people trying to find their way into adulthood.

“In a TIME poll . . . two-thirds said being a teenager is harder for them than it was for their parents. It’s fair to ask whether any teenage generation has ever thought otherwise . . . ”
TIME Magazine, July 31, 2005

It’s senior year in a typical American high school and five students – a jock, a geek, a princess, a heartthrob and a rebel – are teetering on the brink of the future. All they have to do is survive the greatest pressures they’ve ever known – an incredible onslaught of parental expectations, personal insecurities, college dreams, romantic nightmares, sports disasters, prom night nerves, petty vandalism, public embarrassment and the perils of friendship – and they’ll get their first big shot at real life.
From director Nanette Burstein comes the runaway Sundance Film Festival hit, AMERICAN TEEN, a funny, fast-paced tale of one Indiana graduating class that becomes a provocative window into what 21st Century teens are thinking, doing, feeling and going through right now. Burstein started with raw, spontaneous documentary footage of a handful of real-life teenagers in a small Midwestern high school; then, she ingeniously structured her film into a compelling narrative that cuts to the very core of what makes being young so exciting, dangerous and unforgettable – a non-stop mix of wild emotions, fierce hopes, heart-wrenching mistakes, comic misunderstandings and moments of revelation and connection you hold onto for the rest of your life, no matter who you are…or are about to become.
Defying categories, Burstein uses an ample creative arsenal, including animated sequences, collages, voiceovers and music, to redefine the straight-ahead documentary as a humor-fueled dramatic experience that resonates with anyone who is or ever was a teenager.

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There are currently more than 32 million teenagers in the United States. That number has risen 15.5 percent since 1990
– U.S. Census Data, 2005

Teenagers have long been a powerful symbol in American culture. There’s something about their brash, reckless, idealistic personalities, about their unfinished identities and uninhibited emotions that seems to mirror the nation’s personality. They invite extreme interpretations — equally deplored as a sign of all that’s wrong with our alienated, sexualized, consumer-driven society and revered and idolized as all the talent, creativity, energy and hope that is going to drive the world’s future. So central is the teenager in the American imagination that teens have long also been a compelling subject for groundbreaking, popular movies, from REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE to AMERICAN GRAFFITI to THE BREAKFAST CLUB.

There have been countless fictional teens that have won over movie audiences. But what happens when you put a group of five real Middle American teenagers together in the boiling pressure-cooker that is senior year – and all the stereotypes and social hierarchies that define nerds, athletes, basket cases, popular girls and misfits start to fall away? A defining teen movie for these times, AMERICAN TEEN is at heart about how we all construct our identities and set in motion our fates out of the angst and ecstasy of being 17.

The film began with documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein’s unusual vision of making a film that would expand on the classic teen comedies of John Hughes – THE BREAKFAST CLUB, PRETTY IN PINK, SIXTEEN CANDLES – via a fresh, honest, 3-dimensional, 21st Century reality. “I grew up watching movies such as FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and THE BREAKFAST CLUB. Those films had a profound affect on me back then because I could so relate to the portrayal of adolescence and all of its challenges. For the last fifteen years, I have wanted to explore those same themes in a nonfiction film but with all of the complexities and depth of real people that are often lacking in the teen fictional movies.” Burstein explains.

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