By Charlotte Caldwell
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SIDNEY — The latest film by Sidney natives Bill and Turner Ross will soon be available for viewing at a Columbus theater and on a streaming platform.

The Ross brothers, who are Lehman Catholic High School graduates, are the brains behind the documentary “45365.” After making documentaries early in their careers, the pair have evolved into creating narrative films.

Their latest film, “Gasoline Rainbow,” is about five teenagers from inland Oregon going on a road trip to the Pacific coast. It will be available to stream on MUBI, which covered the production costs for the film.

The film will start its theatrical release in New York on May 10 and will be shown more widely on May 17, including at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus. It will stream on MUBI on May 31 alongside the brothers’ other film, “Tchoupitoulas.”

Bill explained how he and Turner came up with the idea for “Gasoline Rainbow,” which Bill said is bigger in scope and budget than any of their previous projects.

“Our last film, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, had just premiered at Sundance and Berlin when the world shut down. We were in separate places texting back and forth about ideas for what we could do next and landed on speaking to our upbringing,” Bill said. “We had already made a film in Sidney so we talked about where it could take place. The Pacific Northwest was a place we were fascinated by. We’d been many times, but never made anything there.”

The brothers discussed hundreds of different titles for the film before deciding on “Gasoline Rainbow” a few weeks before premiering at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

“We liked it as a reference to finding beauty in unlikely places,” Bill said.

The film can be described as loosely scripted and improvised as the Ross’s set up the trip the teenagers would take but gave them no dialogue to recite. The teenagers — Tony Aburto, Micah Bunch, Nichole Dukes, Nathaly Garcia, and Makai Garza — didn’t hang out together as a group of friends before the film.

“Out of our five leads, the two girls knew each other and the three boys knew each other. But once we got them together they felt like they had been lifelong friends,” Bill said. “A lot of the film is inspired by people and experiences we had growing up in Sidney. With our leads, we wanted to mirror the kind of camaraderie we’d experienced.”

Bill said people should see the film because it pays homage to small town life.

“I think especially for folks in Sidney it’s a film about small town kids having an adventure,” Bill said. “… These kids are real and playing a version of themselves and they get into all kinds of fun and trouble.”

Besides the Venice Film Festival, the film also played at the 2023 Sao Paulo International Film Festival, the 2024 SXSW Film Festival and CPH:DOX in 2024.