The Dark Underbelly of “the Waterpark Capital of the World”

Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.

For children of the upper Midwest, few summers would feel complete without a visit to the Wisconsin Dells. Though relatively unknown throughout the rest of the United States (a claim based on the scientifically-approved research process called “Ask Your Geographically Diverse Group Chat”), the small resort town—about a four-hour drive north of Chicago—looms particularly large in the Midwesterner’s imagination. A tourist destination since the 1850s, when visitors came to marvel at the glacier-carved sandstone formations that lend the town its name, the area has, in the past several decades, taken on a campier appeal with the construction of dozens of elaborate theme parks, go-kart tracks, mini golf courses, and other silly attractions. It has also garnered—or given itself—the illustrative title of “the Waterpark Capital of the World.”

Having grown up in nearby Madison, I have a particular soft spot for the Dells. As a kid, my family would frequently go camping at nearby Devil’s Lake where, for one day, my stepbrother and I would get a reprieve from the surrounding natural beauty and instead head to the artificial paradise that the Dells created for us. We’d spend our mornings at Noah’s Ark, the largest waterpark in America, getting deeply sunburned waiting in line for waterslides, eat lunch at a ’50s-themed diner, visit the celebrity wax museum on the downtown boardwalk, then browse the souvenir shops, which sold hunting knives, polished rocks, and arrowheads.

But in the words of Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and I think he was probably imagining the Dells when he wrote that. Family Land has closed, the wax museum was replaced by a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and, while the 1950s diner remains open, a recent Redditor complained that two breakfasts there ran up a bill of $50. Many of the souvenir shops still exist, though through adult eyes, their offerings read less fun and more like a minefield of derogatory ephemera, such as Confederate flag belt buckles (in a Union state!) and fake “Indian” artifacts. That these shops still exist among the fluctuating landscape of this constantly evolving tourist destination, however, speaks to the Dells’ enduring appeal to tourists across generations and centuries. It currently stands as a kitschy amalgamation of novelty architecture, a slapdash, accidental tribute to capitalism and Americana. Throughout the year, the Dells attracts upward of 5 million visitors who spend an estimated $560 million.

To support this year-round influx of tourists, the Dells—with a small permanent population of about 4,000 people—relies largely on nonlocal employees, many of them international students from places like the Dominican Republic, Romania, Turkey, Thailand, and beyond. This young global workforce—actively recruited by the theme parks and other local attractions—arrives on special visas, which provides the opportunity to travel in the United States in exchange for a season of work. Most of these workers have never heard of the Dells or even Wisconsin prior to their arrival, but they come largely hopeful, excited to experience their vision of the American dream and—by chance—end up in the most American location possible.

Filmmaker Nellie Kluz, a cinematographer and camera operator for nonfiction films and docuseries like HBO’s How To With John Wilson, first learned about the Wisconsin Dells when she was attending college in the Midwest, and after visiting, became interested in documenting the area as a novel tourist destination. Through filming, she increasingly became acquainted with the international students who staff the parks, arcades, shops, and casinos. As her understanding of the town’s complex labor economy grew, the focus of her documentary and first feature-length film The Dells, which premiered in 2024, shifted to include their stories. I recently spoke with Kluz about her film, resort town architecture, and the frequently exploitative labor practices that keep many American tourist destinations running. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

How did you learn about the Wisconsin Dells?

Nellie Kluz: I am not from the Midwest, but I was living in Chicago and then I was living and working in Iowa City. I am really interested in tourism and spectacle and all the work that goes into that, and knowing that, friends of mine from the Midwest said, “You got to check out the Dells. You’re probably going to be interested.” So I just went there to check it out and I immediately was like, “Oh, I should make a film here.”

In recent decades, the international presence among the Dells workforce has grown considerably. Your film follows a lot of these workers, many of whom have come to the U.S. on J1 visas. Can you explain what a J1 visa is?

There’s different forms of that specific visa, but the program that the film focuses on is a work and travel program run by the state department. So the idea is if you’re a college student from certain countries, you can get this visa and come to the U.S. for a period of three to four months, although there’s some variation. You work for a big chunk of that in a place like Wisconsin Dells, and then for the rest of it, you’re supposed to take your money you earned and travel and see the U.S. It’s kind of styled as an exchange program, but it’s also a work program.

It seems like most of these students are barely making minimum wage.

Yeah. I mean, it really depends. I think in practical terms, it ends up filling a niche for these resort places with really small populations, where they don’t have a lot of labor. A lot of the students I met were working as housekeepers, waiters, or at the water parks all over town. Everyone is like, “After this, I’m going to New York or L.A. or Las Vegas.”

The three big ones.

I think a lot of the people make a lot less money than they expect. A lot of them are working two jobs.

Who is doing the hiring? Is Noah’s Ark, for example, putting in requests for a certain number of J1 employees?

There are agencies. Towns and locales have to qualify to participate. I think that the employers are coordinating with agencies to get the number of people that they need.

Do they provide housing?

It depends. Some jobs come with housing. The waterparks have dorms and the town has a dorm that you can live in. They pay rent and live in these dorms with two bunk beds for the most part. There’s not enough of that official housing, so a lot of motels have been converted into student housing. Some of the people in my film are living in one of those, and I was actually living in one of those for part of the time of filming.

What was that like?

2021, when I was filming, was a little bit of a lower capacity year because of Covid, so they just had extra room. Usually it’s really hard to get one of those spots, but I was able to get my own cabin. It was completely fine, but it’s bare bones with a hot plate. The housing is not that great, and people pay a weekly fee. It’s a place where there’s all these transient temporary people. In the film, some guys hatched a plan to live out of their van. They thought that would be fun and exciting.

They had lost their housing, right?

Yeah. It’s not really emphasized a lot, but part of the time I was filming was during Covid and the park where they were working had closed. It made the employer’s agenda pretty clear. They were immediately like, “We’re done. You’re kicked out of your dorm. You have a week or something, and good luck.” I think some people went home. A lot of people just found other jobs and scrambled to find other housing.

It seems really precarious in nature. How did you find the people that you were following?

It’s a place where people are really open to socialize because they’re there to meet people from other countries and have this interesting social experience. I would go to events like little barbecues that housing or the employer sponsor would have, and I met people that way. At one point, I also made a poster of myself with a picture of me saying, “Do you want to be in my movie?” That didn’t really work very well. I wasn’t as much filming with the actual employers or at people’s workplaces because, while I asked and made attempts to film inside the water parks and stuff, they’re not really that interested in having someone film.

Did you have a translator with you? There are so many different languages being spoken in the film.

No. When people from all different countries are in big groups, they’re speaking English together, so that was one aspect. Then for people speaking Spanish or Turkish or Romanian, I had the footage translated later. I kept telling the Turkish guys in the film, for example, that I was getting it translated. Then they would make little asides to the translator, like “Don’t use this” or whatever. They were making fun of me a little bit, I learned later.

Was there anyone who stood out for you, in particular? Who really caught your artistic attention or maybe just pulled at your heartstrings? 

The Turkish guys. They got this van. People that are always buying cars off of Facebook Marketplace, all the students, which is so crazy to me. They don’t know the rules of the road, and they’re just driving around.

I remember they weren’t sure if they needed license plates.

They’re very excited about their American adventure and they have a lot of obstacles, from finding new jobs and new housing to just not really making very much money. Then they have these car troubles. They originally caught my attention because their van is really wild looking. They bought it from some Jamaican guys who were using it as a party van.

Those guys really embodied everything. They have this optimism about what you can accomplish in the U.S., even as the evidence was mounting that maybe the experience was actually really difficult and not really set up for them to have this glamorous, lucrative summer.

That was the attitude across so many of the students. They’ve been sold this optimism. The image of the U.S. abroad is of money and glamour.

The idea that you can be a self-made person…

That is very strong. Among most people, most students I met, there was this starry-eyed kind of feeling and I started to feel worried for some of them or just a little disappointed that they were being disappointed sometimes. Although they also had a great time. Everyone I talked to was just enjoying themselves. I showed them the film and they’re like, “Oh, best summer.”

I set out to make a slightly more fun movie than it ended up being. Because you do see a lot of the labor exploitation that’s going on, and also being young is this sort of natural resource that we’re importing from these hopeful people. It’s kind of infectious, but also as a person who’s slightly older and not a college student, who’s native to the U.S., I was like, “Oh my gosh, you guys!” It feels sometimes like there is no experiential joy without exploitation.

I definitely felt privileged to get to see them having some really joyful times despite all this stuff that happens.

There’s a scene where the students are having a cookout by the lake and one of them says she’s not having a good time and the rest of them are kind of in disbelief. What they’re doing seems so hard. It’s really striking.

That’s sort of the summer promise, too. If you’re part of something like this where you’re going to have an adventure and it’s going to be a break from your reality, it’s like it’s blasphemy that it wouldn’t be amazing. The expectation is set up. I feel like that’s the whole Dells, too. People invest it with all of this meaning and expectation, and you kind of get what you expect.

What aesthetically drew you to the Dells?

The novelty architecture there is really striking. It’s all supposed to be sort of exotic or vacation-y, whatever that has meant in different eras. You’ll have weird, cool buildings from the ’60s and ’70s when they were going for a more Bavarian or Swiss aesthetic.

That’s very Wisconsin.

Then there are some of the newer water parks. Mount Olympus is a huge one that’s Greek-themed, so it has a big Trojan horse. It’s incredible to see the imaginary of vacation all layered. There’s old stuff, new stuff. There’ll be murals of dolphins and an island, and it’s sort of like we’re in the middle of Wisconsin. There are no dolphins here.

It’s just an amazing mishmash of beach and anything that seems kind of foreign, exotic, or fun, or exciting. Then it’s in the middle of this beautiful nature and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Thinking about how that can be legible to these kids who come from other countries is so funny to me. They would say, “Oh, the U.S. is so weird,” and I was like, “Not a lot of places in the U.S. look like this.”

Were there any tensions between Wisconsinites or American tourists and this influx of students?

The local people are used to getting these kids and they’re definitely really needed for the workforce, so I think it’s mostly pretty symbiotic. I did talk to students about how they would experience racism at work. These students are interacting with the public constantly, which can lead to all kinds of stuff. But I think for the most part, people in the town are proud of having the students and it’s almost like a selling point. The J1 program has been going on for a long time, so I think most people are pretty used to it.

Why did you call your film The Dells and not, say, Stories of the J1 Visa?

Despite most of the action focusing on these students, it also felt important to make it a portrait of the place and the environment. I called it The Dells for that reason, because it felt like, to me, the town is really it is its own kind of whirlpool. Once you’re in, you’re really locked in and not thinking about the outside world so much. That’s the kind of effect that a vacation-type place can have. I wanted to make sure that we were thinking about the place as this kind of ecosystem, plus the individual students we meet.

The Dells will be screening July 9 and 10 at the Siskell Film Center in Chicago. Pending distributors, the film will eventually be available to stream online. For more information, click here.

Top photo courtesy The Dells

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