Empty America: A Trailer by Barry Walton

The filming of Empty America was inspired by a deep desire to do something more than sitting holed up in my house until our government officials announced the world was safe to enter once again.  In my departure, I felt called to go out and see how a world so void of humanity could feel so chaotic. I wanted to find answers to the questions that lived between the gaps of a deadly virus spreading rapidly throughout the world and the toxic political war spreading rapidly throughout America. I wanted to better understand the dangers of blind conformity and clarify for myself what happens when the speakers stop listening and the listeners stop speaking. In the 8,000 miles of traveling from Los Angeles to New York and ultimately ending in our nation’s capital, I discovered something deep and unknown in the most uncommon of places. Low within broken waves of the AM radio stations, and far off the beaten path for those locked safely within their houses, I found answers to questions buried in soundbites and the iconography of images that presented themselves to me, and me alone, in an empty America. Wrapped within this codex of modern video one can find, if they seek, both the problem and the solution to a different sort of virus, one that is eroding the fabric of our very civilization.

Barry Walton is an Emmy-winning director who bootstrapped his way into documentary filmmaking, starting as a production assistant in Hollywood in 1999. He directed and produced work for NatGeo Channel, Animal Planet, the NHL and NBA, and a variety of corporate brands. Big names aside, he truly has found his passion in making documentary films. Over the past decade, he has traveled to the Himalayas to film the world’s highest footrace, lived in Italy filming the Violin Ghetto, and most recently traveled across the United States in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) shutdown capturing his newest work, Empty America.