Columbia, Missouri. With a population of more than 100,000 this county seat is no rural backwater, but thanks largely to its location, out in the vastness of the American Midwest, its atmosphere is undeniably more "small town" than "big city".
The city is the scene of a notorious murder that took place in 2001, when a local sports journalist was savagely beaten and strangled to death in his newspaper's parking lot. It's here, at the Boone County Courthouse in 2005 - after a trial that has since been subject to national controversy, with both key witnesses having come forward to admit perjury - that Mr Ryan Ferguson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 40 years in jail; he was 19. And it's here that award-winning documentarian Mr Andrew Jenks has come, to see if he can shine a light on a case that is still provoking intense debate.
As a film-maker, Mr Jenks started young. The son of Mr Bruce Jenks, a director at the United Nations Development Programme, he spent much of his youth abroad, visiting Brussels and Nepal as a child. "I'd always have this bulky VHS camera in my hand," he says. "Travelling around where there weren't many people speaking English, that camera became my best friend by default."
After a short stint at New York University, his career began in earnest at age 19 when he created Andrew Jenks, Room 335, a poignant look at end-of-life "assisted living" that saw him move into a nursing home for five weeks. Since then, his charismatic, disarming interview technique has helped make his fly-on-the-wall documentary series, World of Jenks, one of MTV's biggest shows. Sharing the screen with his young participants, Mr Jenks is very much the star of the show, as the name suggests. He insists that by stepping out from behind the camera and forming relationships with his subjects, he is able to offer a greater level of impartiality. "By getting really invested in the stories, I almost do the opposite of drinking the Kool-Aid," he explains. "I become, of whoever I'm following, their harshest critic." If that's true, he's sure to put an interesting spin on the story of Mr Ferguson, who has become something of a Columbia cause célèbre.
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