Before Eliza Fox graduated college, she checked a VHS camera out of a public access station and roped her husband Matt Wilkins into filming their friends. It was an attempt to capture what they were all like at that point in their lives — in all their youthful angst and glory — before they settled in new cities, started careers and raised families.

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That footage was only the starting point for the couple’s documentary “What the Hell Happened?” The Philly-based filmmakers followed up with the pals they interviewed in 1992, creating portraits of five lives over three decades. Their stories will soon screen at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

“What the Hell Happened?” introduces the friends in Iowa City. There’s Doug, a chemistry grad who cracks jokes and smokes cigarettes through his interview. Tim lives out of a trailer while he pays off the debt from his math degree. Anthony is an aspiring artist wary of a 9-to-5 existence. Daniel, Wilkins’ younger cousin, is searching for a path after dropping out of high school. 

The directors also include their journeys. Fox, who was a new mom in 1992, is the fifth subject of the film. Wilkins makes for an unofficial sixth star, thanks to his voiceover narration and frequent presence on screen.

When they picked the project back up in 2021, they genuinely didn’t know what had happened to some of their friends. Doug was battling health problems. Anthony had become a prominent mixed-media artist in Philadelphia with work in the city’s airport. The documentary became a way to restart the conversation. 

“For me, what was really great was going around and reconnecting with all these old friends and going through the details of their life in a way that you wouldn’t just get in a casual conversation,” Wilkins said. “In these interviews, we were able to just get all the little details of what happened and so I had just a much better understanding of my friends.”

Still, catching up behind a camera introduced a different dynamic.

“One of the big dilemmas of this was balancing that act of being a friend versus being a documentarian,” Wilkins said. “There’s some things you might not talk about with your friends because it might make them uncomfortable, but there are questions that as a documentarian, you just got to ask. Otherwise the audience is going to be like, dude, why didn’t you ask about this?”

Distilling a person’s existence down to 18 minutes was another challenge. The first rough cut was six hours. Subsequent edits brought it down to three, then two. Wilkins leaned on his past work as a story producer on “Hoarders” and “Mountain Men” to whittle down the footage to its current running time of 90 minutes.

The upcoming showings of “What the Hell Happened?” at the Philadelphia Film Festival will be their first on the East Coast, following a test screening in Seattle. Fox admits she was too shy to watch herself with the crowd there, but is striving to buck up the courage to sit through the movie this time around. After the documentary’s PFF run, she and Wilkins hope to continue screening it locally — ideally alongside Anthony’s art — and distribute it on Filmhub.

“It’s kind of a nichey thing I guess, for lack of a better word,” Fox said. “But it has spunk. It’s got heart.”

It has also provided a meaningful perspective check for the filmmakers over the years.

“Life does just take a certain amount of resilience in everybody in different ways,” Fox said. “I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting about it. Because you think it’s easy for other people (but) you just don’t know the struggle that anyone’s going through. Then by talking to people with all these different paths, you begin to realize we all have that same struggle and challenges.”

“What the Hell Happened?” is playing this Saturday at 7 p.m. at PFS Bourse and Saturday, Oct. 25, at 6:30 p.m. at PFS East.

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