A new documentary profiles a Belfast family’s attempt to build a life outside “the industrial machine.”
The film, “Turn off the Machines,” centers on Ethan Hughes and his family who live without electricity, modern technology or financial security and have dedicated their lives to working for social justice.
The film taps into growing anxiety about the effects of technology on all aspects of our lives, said Joseph El-Khoury who co-directed the film.
“I hear a lot of people talking about wanting to go off the grid,” he said. “There’s a lot of days when people want to throw their phone into a lake.”
The first seeds for the film were planted several years ago, when El-Khoury and co-director Muhammad Yusuf Khattak, were talking about their concerns about artificial intelligence and the effects of technology on society.
With a grant from Stanford, where Khattak was a student, they traveled across the country talking to academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech and the University of Michigan.
“It was kind of dry,” El-Khoury said. “We really wanted to find people who lived their aversions to tech and didn’t just theorize about it.”
Then the pair met Mo Lotman. Lotman, a friend of Hughes, is known locally for organizing The Underground Lounge, a music venue in the basement of the Belfast Maskers theater and playing keys for the R&B band The Sugar Snaps. But he’s also a prominent critic of new technologies and digital surveillance and founder of The Technoskeptic magazine.
He told El-Khoury and Khattak that they needed to meet Hughes. But he also warned them that he was wary of the media.
“The lack of professionalism on our end was probably what allowed us to make the film,” El-Khoury said. “We came in not as these super-pretentious industry people, but just as people who wanted to connect with him on a human level and just happened to have cameras in our hands.”
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Over the course of two years, El-Khoury and Khattak visited the family four times, capturing footage of Hughes; his wife, Sarah Wilcox-Hughes; and their two daughters as they tended to animals and gardens, played music and helped neighbors.
They also filmed the family, who moved to Belfast seven years ago, interacting with some of the 400 or so people who find their way to the farm each year to learn about their philosophy and gain homesteading skills like chopping wood and canning blueberries.
In one scene, Hughes is teaching a workshop on liberation economies at the Unitarian Universalist church in Belfast. He relates the way Gandhi summed up his life philosophy: renounce and enjoy. “Enjoy not being part of a system that’s killing everything!” Hughes cries. “Enjoy not being part of a system that creates war!”
One of the film’s central questions is how a kid from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who grew up wanting nothing more than to drive a Porsche and play for the Patriots, ended up building a life of voluntary poverty and activism.
Hughes’ “awakening” came when he was 13 when a drunken driver killed his father. He found himself going to middle school looking at his schoolmates and thinking, “We could die. What are we doing with our lives?” he says in the film. “Why are people dying and being hit? Because we’re drunk and so unhappy that we have to use substances all the time.”
The response from adults in Hughes’ life was sympathetic, but didn’t satisfy his searching.
“There wasn’t anybody who said, yeah, our culture isn’t really doing that well. We’re failing people,” he said.
After college and a stint teaching, Hughes decided to give away all of his possessions and bike across the county. He gave away a $150,000 inheritance piecemeal to strangers who needed help and ended up co-founding a community based around the gift economy and a nonprofit called The Possibility Alliance, and embarked on a life of activism — from resisting oil pipelines to helping get land back into Indigenous hands.
Homesteading and political activism are interlocking, Hughes said in an interview. “People think this part isn’t relevant,” he said gesturing to the homestead around him, “but the reparations and direct action are. Others are focused on homesteading but not politics.”
While much of the film is beautiful — showing the family singing before a meal and intimate candlelit interviews — El-Khoury said he took pains to avoid romanticizing Hughes’ and his family’s lives.
“We didn’t have any interest in making a hagiography about Ethan,” he said. “We didn’t want to make an advertisement for his lifestyle. We wanted to be honest.”
Some of the film’s most poignant moments come in interviews with Hughes’ family, who talked about the tradeoffs their unconventional life presents.
“When we were first engaged he told me, ‘I just want you to know that the world is always going to come before our relationship,’” his wife Sarah Wilcox-Hughes says in the film. “Which is a kind of jerky thing to say.”
His oldest daughter, Etta, also told the filmmakers about how sometimes wished her father was more focused on their life at home.
These complexities are what make Hughes’ such a compelling figure, El-Khoury said. “What would we be as filmmakers if we weren’t going to press on that?”
Hughes acknowledged that the tensions around holding a family together without turning his back on the rest of the world persist.
“We all want to give our kids a safe, beautiful life,” he said. But at the same time, his kids aren’t numbed to the pain of the world and are surrounded by love from their family and extended community.
“We laugh more and we cry more,” he said.
Hughes argues that focusing narrowly on the nuclear family and not extending care beyond that boundary is part of what makes it possible for our society to let people go unhoused and unfed. “Arent’ they all our children?” he said, echoing the scholar Vincent Harding.
“Each winter we ask, ‘Should we keep this up?’” Hughes said. “And the answer is always a resounding ‘yes.’”
Hughes hasn’t seen a final cut of the film. But he emphasized that while the film centers on him and his family, they are just a small part of a much broader community and movement.
“If for any reason we’ve done good, it’s because of all the beautiful people around us,” he said. “If people make this just about Sarah and I, they’re missing it.”
El-Khoury is currently submitting the film to festivals and hopes to eventually screen it locally.