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A Town, A Team, And A Dream That Just Won't Die

Published December 19, 2013 at 2:09 PM EST
The Medora Hornets, here with assistant coach Rudie Crain, are the centerpiece of the documentary <em>Medora, </em>from directors Davy Rothbart and Andrew Cohn.
Beachside Films
The Medora Hornets, here with assistant coach Rudie Crain, are the centerpiece of the documentary Medora, from directors Davy Rothbart and Andrew Cohn.

In a high-school locker room in small-town Indiana, a coach is tearing into his basketball team. The Medora Hornets have scored zero points — none at all — in the game's fourth quarter.

In Medora, the hapless team becomes a kind of metaphor for the town itself — "a no-stoplight town," in the words of documentarian Davy Rothbart, one where the jobs have dried up and the population has dwindled.

The voices of Medora, captured here in a conversation between Rothbart and NPR's Melissa Block, are woven throughout a film that, as Block explains on today's All Things Considered, becomes a kind of elegy for a vanishing small-town America.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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