BEYOND THE DUPLEX PLANET (SXSW 2026) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
No one can prepare for the questions artist David Greenberger asks.
The documentary Beyond the Duplex Planet, about a decades-long project that’s spun off into books, film, performance, and music, is as much a spotlight on him as it is a salute to the ineffable source of artistic inspiration. The film premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival.
Since 1979, when he was an art school grad needing a job who got hired at a Massachusetts men’s nursing home, Greenberger has chatted up nursing home residents, recording their stories, musings, and more. He reminded me a little of oral historian Studs Terkel, except his questions come more out of left field, such as, “Do you prefer coffee or meat?” (“You can go far with coffee,” someone replied.)
Greenberger typed up his initial Q&As into a photocopied zine called The Duplex Planet, a nod to the nursing home’s name. While the residents were less than impressed, his friends devoured the issue with humor and wonder. The zine went on to have more than 180 issues, paying subscriptions, and fans such as musicians Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Louie Perez of Los Lobos. Greenberger has shared bits of his subjects’ anecdotes with venue audiences nationwide, late night hosts, and National Public Radio.
“He was able to get rock snobs to care about the elderly,” magician and entertainer Penn Jillette, another admirer, says here.
Directed by Beth Harrington, Beyond the Duplex Planet is an abbreviated look at how the zine evolved, taking Greenberger’s art along with it. Collaborating with musician Tyson Rogers, Greenberger matches tones and music with the words, striving to create an experience for listeners that captures his subjects’ essence.
Some of this takes a bit to absorb, but Greenberger becomes engaging if offbeat company. He’s as much an archivist as an artist, saving photographs, sketches, and taped answering machine messages, lending the film a charming, analog quality. Harrington (The Winding Stream) gets a lot of mileage out of these recordings, featuring Greenberger’s late parents and his daughter at a young age intermingled with agents and comedian George Carlin.
Through the zine, Greenberger helped one resident, Ernest Noyes Brookings, become a published poet in his eighties and another, Ken Eglin, a music critic. His affection for some of his subjects is deep and bittersweet. Eglin, a World War II veteran, died with no other family, so Greenberger received the folded American flag at his funeral. The ashes of another resident who had no other contacts sit at Greenberger’s home.
His project was never really about aging, even though he notes there’s less of an age gap between him and his subjects than there used to be. While “the ephemeralness of it all” affects him more nowadays, he’s still someone drawn to people and their accidental poetics and ironies, someone with the knack of homing in on just the right resonate phrase. (He titled a collection of remote interviews during the COVID-19 pandemic Everybody’s Home, where someone observed, “Everyone’s an existentialist now, even if they don’t want to be.”)
How much art might we find, how much could we share in our lives, if only we bothered to listen.
