Following the finale of his acclaimed HBO series How To with John Wilson, documentarian John Wilson looks to the bedrock of his beloved New York City for inspiration and structure. Concrete, the world’s most widely used building material, appears as an ever-present life force, and John sets out to make the definitive documentary on the matter. After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, he decides to use the industry-approved Hallmark formula to tell this seemingly drab story and increase his movie’s appeal. But his foundation soon begins to crumble — literally and figuratively — as he struggles to balance artistic freedom with the realities of the modern film industry.
“John Wilson possesses the innocent curiosity of a child and the calm wisdom of an ancient philosopher…. THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE is, unsurprisingly, for the “How To With John Wilson” creator, blisteringly funny. More startling is that it is also one of the finer, more moving documentaries of recent memory…. Feels like being caught in the flow of a casually moving river, its ebbs and flows persistently novel yet inevitable. It is a wholly distinct experience.” —Gregory Nussen, ScreenRant “He’s a rather awkward fellow, a talented filmmaker, and a lover of people. Above all else, though, he’s an artist. He’s a deeply, often profoundly strange one…but an artist he remains…. This feature is more than just one very long episode of his show. Instead, it’s like Wilson has fully become a funnier, more frenetic version of Frederick Wiseman.” —Chase Hutchison, The Wrap “John Wilson is the Werner Herzog of the mundane, the lo-fi poet laureate of New York City. He’s half puckish prankster, half earnest documentarian, all inquisitive wanderer…. Were THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE merely Wilson’s tongue-in-cheek version of an educational film, it would be satisfying, but his thematic preoccupations are as crucial as his visual ones. Concrete is concrete, but it’s a paved gateway to talk about permanence at a moment that Wilson’s life felt particularly impermanent, which things society preserves and which we allow to crack and crumble.” —Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
