WHO better than director Charlie Lyne to clue you up on his found-footage documentary Beyond Clueless, the Discover Tuesday film choice at City Screen, York, tomorrow at 6.30pm?

"It's an essay film about teen movies, and it's basically been a labour of love for me and a small handful of collaborators," wrote the film critic turned first-time director in his letter of introduction.

"We made it in my bedroom, premiered it at SXSW [the South By South West festival in Austin Texas] last March; screened it more than 20 international film festivals and are now self-distributing it around the UK. "

Lyne's film was funded wholly by more than 500 Kickstarter backers in January 2013, setting in motion a year-long production process. "The idea was to construct the film entirely out of other films, using no original footage whatsoever" says Charlie.

"So we were presented with the challenge of building an original story with only a few basic elements: film clips; the voice of our incredible narrator Fairuza Balk and our original soundtrack by pop duo Summer Camp."

Part adolescent fever dream, part visual essay about the representation of adolescence in teen flicks such as Clueless, Mean Girls, Jeepers Creepers and Ginger Snaps, Beyond Clueless (15) puts more than 200 teen movies under the microscope on a quest to lay bare the genre’s beating heart. Guiding that journey is narrator Balk, cult star of "stone-cold teen classics" The Craft and Almost Famous.

"The film came out of a period of binge-watching all the teen movies I'd grown up watching," says writer/director/editor/producerCharlie, who had earlier founded the cult movie blog Ultra Culture.

"I'm in my mid-20s, so I'd put just enough years between my age now and my teens. I became obsessed with seeing these films again and noting things I hadn't spotted the first time.

"It's a bottomless pit of intrigue, though viewing them now I'm older is slightly more bittersweet, but I still get just as much pleasure, a heady thrill, so it's a strange feeling of simultaneous joy and discomfort."

Assembling the footage, one unsurprising common thread emerged. "Almost all the films are American and seem to take place in a very specific American high school parallel universe that I was living my teens through. A lot of these films may be horror movies but there are a lot of different movies in this genre and, for me, one of the joy s of Beyond Clueless is coaxing more meaning from these films than seems to be there at first.

"The whole genre is usually treated as light and throwaway but directors like Blair Hayes and Darren Stein are delighted that someone is treating their work more seriously. The film is both a documentary and a teen movie; one review said it's a teen movie about teen movies and that's right."

Box office: 0871 902 5726 or at picturehouses.co.uk


Did you know?

From the 300 teen movies Charlie Lyne watched in his research, 2004's EuroTrip is his favourite. Why? "It has all kinds of layers beneath the surface," he reasons.