Class of UNCSA: Three Films by a/lumni

As a fellow UNCSA alum, I am beyond excited to be presenting three films by former Fighting Pickles this fall at a/perture cinema. These films, along with so many more, were the reason that I found this school in the first place, and were huge inspirations to myself and my classmates. Whether you are seeing these films for the first time, or if you’ve returning with fond memories, we hope you enjoy this breadth of styles, tones, and stories, mostly from filmmakers early on in their careers.  

Our first selection, Land Ho! , is celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary this year. Co-directed by two alumni, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, and produced by David Gordon Green, the film follows two longtime friends and former brothers-in-law who take a spontaneous trip to Iceland in hopes of getting their groove back. Earl Lynn Nelson, a relative of Martha Stephens who featured in her earlier films Passenger Pigeons and Pilgrim Song, is a force of nature in this film, a constant inciting incident who challenges and motivates his friend and other tourists and locals that the duo come into contact with during their time abroad, all with a strong drawl that only adds to his charm.  

Paul Eenhoorn is the other side of this coin, a more reserved and cautious man named Colin who is pushed and prodded by Nelson’s extrovert tendencies. Eenhoorn had a career spotlight just year prior to this film with yet another UNCSA alumni, Chad Hartigan’s This is Martin Bonner. The two encounter new experiences with a fascinating balance, always threatening to tip into either too-broad comedy or too-muted drama, but they instead manage a delicate partnership that displays the years of connection, heartbreak and career setbacks that come with reaching your 70’s.  

Both Stephens and Katz have made a small, yet significant leap in production value and stylistic maturity here. Katz was an early voice in the mumblecore movement with films such as Quiet City and Cold Weather. The movement was marked by an accessibility for filmmakers with more opportunities using digital cameras and editing software, significantly reducing the cost of film production. Often starring unprofessional actors with a loose outline, the films were handmade and not trying to reach overly dramatic conclusions, their films were deeply human and made from the pure passion of telling stories cinematically.  

Stephens also emerged from this lower-budget world, but instead of working with the modern issues of living in an urban setting like New York or Chicago as was most common, she focused her lens on her home state of Kentucy, embracing the Appalachian Trail with Pilgrim Song specifically. Again, there is hand-held camera work and a focus on the internal dramas of human relationships, her films often had a calmer and more observational feel, reflecting the site of production and her own taste and style based on her upbringing in a small town in rural America.  

You’ll notice Land Ho! Has a more refined feel, less hand-held camera work and more traditional filmic techniques, utilizing whip-pans and zooms to heighten the fish-out-of-water comedy that drives these two characters through their travels, while also making time to stop and appreciate the grand landscapes of Iceland. From Reykjavík to hot springs in the mountains, Mitch and Colin’s journey is beautiful not only in the vistas surrounding the two, but also in the humanity that gives characters often relegated to the side in other films the chance to open up and share their fears and concerns about family and growing older.  

On the other end of the comedy spectrum, we have the blueprint to one of the most successful comedy actors in America, who can definitely be accused of playing similar characters throughout his career, but makes them so entertaining and human it’s hard to complain.  

Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way was funded by friends and family, and created after star Danny McBride had tried his luck in Los Angeles, only to return home and work as a substitute teacher and bartender in South Carolina. The film’s budget is low, but McBride’s portrayal of Fred Simmons, a karate instructor in Concord, is anything but. The film has a lose narrative, with Fred’s troubled relationship with his wife and students setting the table for a visit from his favorite karate star, Chuck “The Truck” Wallace, played by fellow alum Ben Best. Hill also acts in the film, a compatriot of Fred’s tendencies in taking himself far too seriously.  

The film premiered at Sundance in 2006, but wasn’t released theatrically until 2008. The story is the film bounced around LA following it’s festival premiere, but studios and distributors didn’t really know what to do with this small, strange, but undeniably hilarious look at a potentially insane karate instructor in the south. It wasn’t until Will Ferrell and Adam McKay backed the film, fresh off their huge success with Anchorman and Talladega Nights, acting as ‘presenters’ of this film, that it was able to find it’s audience.  

Ferrell would go on to act in this group’s follow-up project, the hit HBO show Eastbound & Down, which would further solidify McBride, Hill, and Gordon Green’s talents as comedic filmmakers. The character archetype that Fred Simmons represents would transfer onto Kenny Powers, McBride’s character in Eastbound, as well as their follow-up HBO series Vice Principals and the ongoing The Righteous Gemstones. Confident to the extreme, with a hard exterior betraying very human emotions on the inside, McBride has perfected this character over time, going on to star in many studio comedies, perhaps most notably in This is The End, where he steals the show from some of the other great comedy actors of this generation.  

Lastly, our trilogy concludes with 2007’s Great World of Sound, directed by alum Craig Zobel and shot by Adam Stone, a Wake Forest alum who is perhaps best known as Jeff Nichols’ go-to cinematographer, lensing all of his films from fellow 2007 release Shotgun Stories to this year’s The Bikeriders.  

The cinematography is of special interest here, as Great World of Sound has a noticeably more restrained visual style, while operating on a similar small budget to the other films in this series. The film follows two recent hires at a suspicious record company, directed to scout talent and convince singers to fork over $3000 as a ‘commitment’ to their nascent careers, while the company will take care of the rest, most importantly getting these demos to radio stations and record labels. Indie stalwart Pat Healy stars with longtime character actor Kene Holiday, a tornado of personality and charisma that helps the duo attract aspiring musicians at first, until they start to realize things may not be as they seem with their employers.  

In addition to a visual style closer to something you’d see from the 70’s New Hollywood movement, the audition scenes take on an additional sense of reality, as the filmmakers set up actual auditions for hopeful songwriters and performers, only to find their permission afterwords, lending an incredible sense of reality and veritie to these sequences in particular. Zobel has repeatedly stated that the biggest film influence on his own debut was the Maysles’ brother’s landmark documentary, Salesman, nearly impossible to miss in this story of unaware con-men finding their morality in cheap motel rooms across the Midwest and southeastern United States.  

Zobel would go on to essentially become a journeyman director, creating a wide range of fascinating stories across multiple genres, although you can find a cinematic throughline in his depictions on the reality of the American Dream, or whatever is left of it. From the haunting recreation that questioned our trust in authority figures with 2011’s Compliance, all the way to his most recent feature, The Hunt, which drew a fair bit of controversy before it’s release, dissecting the audience’s associations to class hierarchy and political alignment in an election year, Zobel has always found a way to reflect our own prejudices and expectations through genre and strong character work.  

(A specific shout-out to his work with HBO’s The Leftovers, Zobel is responsible for directing one of the show’s best episodes, season 2’s International Assassin. Leftover-heads, you know what I’m talking about.) 

Overall, you’ll see many different characters, narratives, and themes throughout these three films, and hopefully through following these remarkable filmmakers’ works, you can find more. The recurring idea I walk away with, despite the surface differences, is a deep passion for cinema and its history, adapting older styles through modern technology, and a definite sense of collaboration. There are many filmmakers who collaborated on some or all of these films, and that is maybe the strongest lesson I took from my time at UNCSA, and from watching and studying work from the alumni. They may not be in Winston anymore, but they’re all Fighting Pickles for life.