DIRECTOR:

Austin Lee Bunn

SYNOPSIS

A married dairy farmer travels to a gay campground in rural NE Pennsylvania to search for the man he fell in love with 30 years before -- and discovers the past is not done with him yet.  A narrative/doc hybrid film.

DIRECTOR BIO

Austin Bunn is a filmmaker, screenwriter and teacher. A former journalist (for the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere), he wrote the script for the film Kill Your Darlings (Sony Pictures Classics), which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. His short films and documentaries have screened at Frameline (SF), OutFest (LA), InsideOut (Toronto), Provincetown International Film Festival (MA), Sidewalk Film Festival (AL), and elsewhere. He is the author of "The Brink: Stories" (HarperPerennial) and "A Killer Life: How an Independent Producer Survives Deals and Disasters Far from Hollywood".

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

There are thirty-some LGBT campgrounds in America – a phenomenon that started in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic as refuges for urban gay men and as meeting places for rural (often closeted) men from conservative areas. In the summer of 2022, I decided to make a documentary about one of the oldest gay campgrounds, Hillside, located in the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania, exploring how campgrounds help heal an estrangement between gay culture (often urbanized) and nature. After weeks of interviewing, I ran into some unexpected obstacles – foremost, that some men risked exposure in speaking to me and many prized their privacy (Hillside has a long-standing “no cameras” policy). So, in an effort to capture the transformational experiences of many of them described, I pivoted and built a composite character from the stories I heard and filmed a narrative that unfolds in the real place, on an actual weekend, blended with interview material. The film features six “perms” (resident campers and non-actors) and two professional actors, along with dozens of Hillside campers as extras.