Dayton Diaries

Directed by Shimon Dotan

Dayton, Ohio, has a history to be proud of: engineers, poets, playwrights, statesmen, and inventors (including the Wright brothers) have lived and worked here, and the accords that ended the war in Bosnia were signed here. Little remains of this legacy today. In 2021, Dayton is a poverty-stricken city devastated by crime, unemployment, and drugs. Filmmaker Shimon Dotan (The Settlers) tries to trace the events that led to Dayton’s downfall. In half-abandoned neighborhoods, he meets young people and old, single and married with children, lining up for food, living in improvised tents in the snow, squatting in derelict buildings. All got addicted to legally prescribed painkillers, and were abandoned by the system. With painstaking care and a lot of compassion, Dotan manages to show the path of destruction left by the United States’ other great epidemic—the opioid plague.