
Oxyana
Oceana, West Virginia sits between mountains that look untouched by anything, the kind of scenery that makes the town's nickname, "Oxyana," land harder once you hear it. Director Sean Dunne turns his camera on residents living inside a prescription opioid epidemic that has hollowed out the town from within, filming addicts, dealers, recovering users, and family members in kitchens, cars, and front porches rather than clinical settings. A young woman describes shooting up in front of her children. A former football player talks through what OxyContin took from his body and his prospects. There is no narrator and no outside expert framing the crisis in statistics; the film lets the town's own residents describe how pain pills became the local economy, passed hand to hand faster than the coal jobs that used to hold the place together. The mountains stay in frame throughout, beautiful and indifferent, while the people in front of them talk plainly about needles, withdrawal, and the friends they have already buried.