Stories set over one long, wild night are perennial favourites in cinema. STATIONED AT HOME, Daniel V. Masciari’s ode to small-town Americana, takes place in Binghamton, New York, on Christmas night as the International Space Station is due to pass across the night sky. Taxi driver Ralph (Erik Bjarnar) sets off on his final solitary shift before the holiday, the radio keeping him company and abreast of the Space Station’s journey through the sky. But along the way, he finds his plans diverted and interrupted by the many adventures, tales, exploits, and everyday human stories far closer to home.

Directed, written, and edited by Masciari, STATIONED AT HOME blends gentle absurdity and moments of sincerity to create a world both heightened and mundane; the result is a deeply humane, elegiac look at a time not long gone, when the world felt a little smaller among the stars. The black and white cinematography by Jackson Jarvis hearkens to an older era of televised entertainment, simultaneously tying the inhabitants of this Binghamton to a cosier, nostalgic, more community-oriented vision for American culture. The score by Logan Nelson also captures this mix of the retro and the futuristic.

Masciari, however, does not succumb to these seductions in characterisation, plot, and script; his warts-and-all depictions of people and their situations have a biting modernity. The juxtaposition of these qualities gives a heartwarming view of the country’s past – without veering into saccharine sentimentality – and a hopeful one of its future.

The grassroots project, filmed entirely in the real Binghamton, is a testament to Masciari’s and his crew’s hard work not only on an extremely limited budget but with a group of similarly passionate on-screen collaborators from all walks of life and past experiences. Masciari worked with local, mostly non-professional actors from the Ithaca Actor’s Workshop using the Meisner technique, where performers are supposed to focus on their scene partner(s) and react genuinely rather than on their own interior journeys. The result heightens naturalism in front of the camera, with no self-consciousness or overacting, and it is clear the performers are all very comfortable with one another and these working methods.

In the film’s final third, Ralph and his friends find themselves on a quixotic holiday outing, bound by their companionship and determined, despite the odds, to let nothing stand in the way of their goals. After spending an hour and a half with this crew, it is impossible not to root for them in all their foibles. STATIONED AT HOME is a resoundingly successful experiment in non-professional casting that uses a shared ethos to create something special. The result is a tale of community, discovery, dreams, and togetherness, bearing witness to everyday resilience and dreams.