SUMMER 2000: THE X-CETRA STORY Documentary

At first glance, the story behind SUMMER 2000: THE X-CETRA STORY seems like the kind of improbable music-history legend the internet was invented to uncover: four girls at the dawn of the new millennium, one homemade album, a handful of CDs and a forgotten recording that resurfaces twenty years later to viral acclaim. But actress-turned-filmmaker Ayden Mayeri’s (HONEYJOON, AFI FEST 2025) joyful and poignant documentary quickly reveals that the re-discovery is about much more than a long-lost album. In the summer of 2000, four pre-teen friends in Santa Rosa, California — Mayeri, Jessica Hall and sisters Janet and Mary Washburn — decided they were destined for pop stardom. Inspired by the Spice Girls and NSYNC, they dubbed themselves X-Cetra, wrote songs, made home videos and, with help from Janet and Mary’s musician mother Robin O’Brien, recorded an eight-track album – which sounded nothing like their musical influences. Then childhood gave way to adolescence, the friendship changed and the music was largely forgotten. Two decades later, their homemade recordings unexpectedly resurfaced online. What began as a curiosity among music enthusiasts grew into a cult phenomenon, attracting record-label interest, sampling by other artists and attention from publications including Rolling Stone. The extraordinary second life of X-Cetra brings the four friends back together as Mayeri’s wonderful feature documentary debut draws on an intimate archive of VHS footage, photographs, diaries and music to revisit a friendship from both sides of adulthood. As the women confront memories of growing apart, difficult teenage years and the complicated histories that shaped them, the film asks whether the carefree creativity of childhood can ever truly be recovered. Winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature, Mayeri’s funny, candid, nostalgic and unexpectedly moving film transforms an eccentric music discovery into a portrait of female friendship and coming of age, exploring the fleeting freedom of being young enough to create without self-consciousness and the parts of ourselves that adulthood can make us forget. –Abbie Algar