Oceana, West Virginia—known as “Oxyana” after its residents’ epidemic abuse of OxyContin—is a tragically real example of the insidious spread of drug dependency throughout the country. Set against an abandoned coal mining landscape to the melodies of Deer Tick’s haunting score, this unflinchingly intimate documentary probes the lives of Oceana’s afflicted and exposes the day-to-day experience of a town living in the harsh grip of addiction.
USANR
USA
Growing up in rural Indiana, I can relate to the boredom that drives some people out of their sober minds. You really have to find a passion, something that will drive your life outside of your job which may entail sitting on an assembly line and performing repetitive tasks. This documentary is about people living in rural West Virgina, an area that somehow has less to do than rural Indiana. It's about people that haven't found their own volition. People that have pasts worth forgetting or dead friends worth remembering. Oxyana is a beautiful and haunting documentary that pulls back the carpet on an American mobile home filled with prescription drugs.
Documentaries about life in America are a total guilty…
Soul crushing documentary about the tidal wave of pill addiction that ravaged a town called Oceana in West Virginia. So much addicted that the place is popularly known as Oxyana. Really affecting, sometimes the stories are too much to bear. A tear might betray you here.
Watching this for my Rural Health class really opened my eyes moreso to the spreading opioid crisis throughout rural America.
Devastating, intimate, and imo avoids most of the trappings of poverty porn with its respectful and unflinching pov.
Oxyana is a portrait of a small West Virginian town that has been decimated by the abuse of the prescription drugs by the majority of its residents. The director manages to capture the raw human element at the heart of the tragedy but in many ways I was left needing more, more of an exploration as to the why and the how of it all. 82 minutes of talking heads and some beautiful scenery is all well and good but there's only so much an overweight drug addict can tell you about a situation before you need to hear from experts for example, witnessing said overweight drug addict injecting and snorting is visually affecting but it actually adds nothing solid to proceedings. Yes the situation is messed up but we know as much at the end as we did at the beginning and that was disappointing.
Heartbreaking
This documentary is a haunting look at the opioid crisis as told through several deeply personal narratives. It is incredible, the story that is formed through the interviews of the residents of the small town of Oceana.
I don’t know much, but I know the war on drugs just ain’t working.
tough watch. i wish there was more looking into the introduction of drugs and the failure of the system in WV, instead of so many interviews.
music was fantastic and the visuals were very good
Genuinely disgusting how the documentary crew is exploiting these people and making a profit of their addiction. These people and this city are depicted as addicts and nothing else, leading to a documentary that practically says nothing other than “addiction is bad.” Never once do I feel like this documentary tries to show the humanity behind these people and their life’s, as they only interview folks and never sit down to really understand them. These shallow portrayals end up only trapping this poor community in a stereotype that I’d argue hurts the community more than anything.
I usually don’t get on letterboxd and write long ass reviews for movies people don’t care about, but the YouTube comment section under this documentary is full of people asking “why don’t these people just get jobs and do something with their lives?” And it makes me sad that not enough people understand what southern West Virginia has gone through to get to where it is today. In post-coal mining rural Appalachia, there really aren’t other opportunities for people unless they uproot their entire lives to a big city. It’s an incredibly vicious cycle that’s so misunderstood. My dad grew up 45 minutes away from Oceana, and we drove through the town to get to his hometown last year. When stopped…
"He didn't kill me that day, but he did, y'know what I mean? And to be honest with you I'm just waiting for my turn."
A bleak painting of the American dream, crumbled and stomped into a dying coal town hooked on oxycontin.
This isn't only a documentary on abuse, it's a portrait of the backwater fringes of the U.S, an already degradadated and dwindling population being ravaged by an immovable, unstoppable, infallible force that will suck away its life until there is nothing left.
It is quiet, and heavy, it shows people struggling to find any point of positivity and break down again under the realization of their inevitable demise in the town they were born, and the town they will remain.
Sad, beautifully made documentary about people in the grips of a drug epidemic in an economically devastated town. The filmmakers are not only talented but also patient and trusting enough to let their subjects do the talking, instead of shoving themselves into every frame or adding a dumbass narration to the background to "explain" it to you (somebody needs to show this film to Louis Theroux, by the way). Haunting film that makes you connect emotionally with its subjects. That's all you can ask any filmmaker.
