Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story slots nicely into the same lineage as Found Magazine and Mortified, presenting at first as being about pop culture nostalgia and outsider art, only for a deeper meaning to emerge. Here, the millennium era of it all – VHS footage of tweeners waxing rhapsodic about Freddie Prinze Jr., for one revealing example – is just the chrysalis of what evolves into a heartfelt portrait of female friendship, and a tribute to childhood’s all-too-short magic hour of unfettered imagination.
It’s an intensely personal documentary for Ayden Mayeri, an actress, first-time director, and founding member of X-Cetra. That’s what Mayeri and her neighborhood friends living in Santa Rosa, Calif., called themselves in 2000 when they penned middle school lyrics, sung out of tune, that one of their moms, a musician, then merged with bizarro beats to make an album that improbably found success when it wandered online two decades later. (Well, maybe not that improbable: Note Ken Kwapis’ documentary about the Shaggs is also playing this year’s festival; who among us doesn’t love to claim a folk artist, turn an oddity into a cult hero?)
Mayeri’s nearness to the subject both enriches the documentary, and complicates it. Frequently on camera, she’s a charismatic entry point, and her trove of childhood diaries and home movies starring besties Jessica and Janet and Janet’s younger sister Mary give her plenty of you-are-there material to work with. (The archival footage is skillfully interwoven with talking head interviews and 2020s scenes of the old friends reconnecting by editors Phil Rosanova and Audrey Leach.) The cynic in me did wonder about how much of the story’s eye-popping trajectory was influenced by the existence of a rolling camera; or, put another way, did the band reunite and record new tracks because that’s the course life took, or because it would make a good movie? Rebuttal: Is the chicken-or-the-egg conversation even worth having in our hypermediated age, where anybody with an Instagram account is fluent in controlling the narrative?
In the end, I didn’t really care either way because I was entirely invested in these lovely women, who gesture at the ways life disappointed them or they lost contact with each other, without the film feeling overwhelmed or overly confessional. Summer 2000 is deceptively light – in the way it pulls into focus the four women’s different experiences, and how it articulates the magic in shared make-believe. So light, in fact, I felt my heart lift after 104 minutes in its company.
