Do You LARP?

Documentary about role-playing Putnam camp to screen at Howland
Alex Simmons was deep in the jungles of the Amazon, shooting a documentary for National Geographic about black market gold mines, when his co-director, Carina Mia Wong, turned to him and asked, "What do you know about LARPing?"
Simmons didn't know anything about LARPing, or Live Action Role Playing. But when Wong told him about a LARPing summer camp in the Hudson Valley called Wayfinder, in which adolescents and teens spend a week running around in the Putnam County woods, improvising elaborate fantasy tales and whacking each other with foam swords, he agreed they'd found the subject for their next film.
"When you're a kid, everything gets delineated," Simmons said. "You're told that you can either be into sports or be a nerd. But when I was a kid, I liked sports and Dungeons & Dragons."

After an epic campaign through the festival circuit resulting in a dragon's hoard worth of awards, including a special jury award at the 2024 SXSW Festival in honor of the film's "bravery and empathy," We Can Be Heroes comes to the Howland Cultural Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday (Feb. 26). After the screening, presented by the Beacon Film Society, Judson Packard, the Wayfinder camp director, will answer questions.
"What matters is that the campers get to tell their own stories," Packard says in the film. "And for each one of them, they are the main character of that story."
Packard found Wayfinder as a wayward and moody teenager 20 years ago. It is a place where neurodivergent, LGTBQ+ and/or teens who don't feel like they fit in can be themselves. As a camper in the film exclaims: "It's all just a bunch of nerds, straight up vibing."

Wayfinder was happy to participate with the filmmakers. But logistics were more challenging. "You have 40 kids running through 500 acres of land," said Wong. "How do we film that?"
The filmmakers spent a summer figuring out how to film at night in the woods, where to place cameras and when to do tick checks (constantly). They also looked for campers they could follow. "It was a gut feeling," said Wong. "Who has the potential for a transformation? Whose journey are we invested in? Where can things go in a week?"
The documentary focuses on kids like Cloud, an 11-year-old, first-time camper from White Plains who puts in two hours of daily lightsaber practice. There's Dexter, a 15-year-old homeschooler from Manhattan who's written two-thirds of a fantasy trilogy but just wants to get his crush's phone number by the end of the week.

And there's Abby, a 17-year-old, budding animator who is battling gastroparesis and spinal muscular atrophy and has been given a troubling long-term diagnosis.
Nevertheless, arriving at camp, Abby tells the filmmakers, "I'm pumped as hell. … Am I allowed to curse?"

The scene gets more deliriously chaotic when the campers begin the "adventure game," an improvised, multi-day storyline. Entitled "The Last Green," the scenario posits that the campers form six tribes of faeries facing a mysterious black void that is closing in around them.
The story becomes a film within a film as the tribes figure out whether they can work together to save their world. What happens next is something completely unexpected.
Before the game kicks off, some campers say they see the story as a metaphor for climate change. But there's another darkness that the kids have been fighting off: The film was shot in the summer of 2022, as the pandemic began to wane. For many campers, even though they're wearing full-body cardboard armor and giving themselves names like Shard Dorpington and Infernuis Nocturna, this is the most normal thing they've done in years.
"During the filming, it hit us how impactful COVID has been on this generation," said Simmons. "They were telling us, 'I didn't get to have my senior prom,' or 'It was supposed to be the most important year of my life, and I missed it.' I still get emotional thinking about it."
The Howland Cultural ...