Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price blow whistles as they run down the New York city movie theater ailse wearing workout clothes and visors with little bleeping lights. Is Sarah wearing a life preserver? They get all the hipsters out of their seats for a stretch and a camp song. This is last night’s Q&A for Summercamp! at Thom Power’s Stranger Than Fiction. Indeed.

But quirky, awkward and offbeat are the realms in which Summercamp! succeeds as a film. It follows several pre-teens during a 3-week sleep away summer camp. A nature camp, at that read: no color wars. It brought to mind So Much So Fast and 51 Birch Street, for the fact that it is about average people, in this case kids, dealing with life’s everyday dramas. There are so many moments in the film where the audience reacted audibly, like when a boy chokes back tears admitting he misses his mom or when another tells the camera that he is having a hard time because no one likes him or when the little tough guy gets a major wedgie (pictured). To hear the audience, you’d think we were all ‘that’ kid. Seeing Sarah and Bradley at the Q&A, it’s not hard to imagine how they were able to exist within the kids’ world to elicit such raw honesty.

Unlike So Much So Fast or 51 Birch Street, Summercamp! lacks the topical gravity or longitudinal depth of time to capture more than a snippet of life which, to my mind, will make it a hard sell to many. Yet it is a great family doc and one that you can watch without feeling the weight of the world bearing down on your shoulders, which sometimes is exactly how you want to spend an evening. Oh, and The Flaming Lips soundtrack is excellent!