Vernon, Florida

‘We had a six-minute rule: "Shut up and let people talk for six minutes and they‘ll show you how crazy they really are".‘ Says Errol Morris. And crazy is what they are in Vernon, Florida, a sleepy American town that Morris had set his sight on as early as the mid-seventies. Back then, he had read in a newspaper article that the 883 inhabitants of Vernon had lodged various insurance claims after they had mysteriously sustained fractured limbs. Without a voice-over or structured question-and-answer sessions, Morris portrays a worm breeder, a man who is obsessively hunting for turkeys, a clergyman holding a ten-minute sermon about the meaning of the word ‘therefore‘, and other people. It seems to be casual chatter, but the film humorously and relentlessly exposes the nature of an American white trash community. Errol Morris (1948) studied philosophy in Berkeley, California. While working at the Pacific Film Archive, he got into contact with the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, with whom he felt a strong thematic affinity.