In the early 1960s, the lumber town of Leavenworth, Washington, faced extinction. A group of local leaders created Leavenworth Improvement For Everyone (LIFE) and adopted a recommendation from the state university to transform their town into a Bavarian village. Forty years on, this slow, observational film by German filmmaker Hannes Lang takes us on a tour of the town, now site of the second-largest Oktoberfest celebration outside of Munich and host to more than a million tourists each year. With its mixture of devoted and despondent inhabitants, Leavenworth offers a mounting sense of anticipation as the film progresses, but the expected excitement never materializes. Instead we get a glimpse of what life is like in one large cultural approximation, where maintaining the “authenticity” of an inauthentic place means economic and social viability. AK