Sketchbook Productions announced the upcoming DVD release of its award-winning documentary,
Average Community. The docu-memoir, directed by Trenton, New Jersey, native Fred Zara, will be available October 12 through the film's website,
AverageCommunity.com and then within weeks, also on Amazon.com. Foreign rights for the DVD were picked up by the Toronto-based distribution company Hiltz Squared Media Group.
Average Community revisits the 1980s hardcore-punk scene during the heyday of City Gardens, the now-defunct Trenton punk club that was once a favorite nightspot for music fans all over the Northeast. The film took home the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary from the 2009 CMJ Film Festival, where it played at the Norwood Screening Room in New York's West Village. The film also won Best Music Documentary from the 2010 Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and the Best-in-Fest Award from the Florida Reel Film Festival.
The DVD includes more than three hours of extras, bonus footage and deleted scenes.
About the Film
Welcome to Trenton, New Jersey, a post-industrial wasteland of abandoned factories, neglected row houses and urban decay. Trenton is a relic of America's once-thriving manufacturing economy, the kind of city most of us have long forgotten. But for Fred Zara, a 30-something family man living an average suburban life near downtown Orlando, it's not so easy a place to forget.
Growing up in Trenton in the mid-1980s, Fred went by the name of Fred Fatal, played drums in the punk-rock band Prisoners of War, and was filled with so much teen angst that he managed to get himself kicked out of high school before reaching the 10th grade.
Average Community follows Fred on a 900-mile journey back to his hometown to confront his troubled past, and the troubled people in it, in the hopes of understanding how the person he was made him into the person he is. Fred is joined by his two older brothers, one a disheartened New York journalist, the other a free-spirited Seattle musician, as he reunites with old friends, revisits painful memories and tries to make sense of what it meant to grow up in a dying city.