After making my first two documentary features, The Aggressives (2005) and Trail Angels (2010) and years of discovering talent as a casting director coupled with a lifetime of painting and art-making, I was yearning to make my dream come true and create a narrative feature which utilized all my skills and experiences as a storyteller. When I discovered “Sunset Edge” an abandoned trailer park in the rural South, I knew right away I had found the “stage for my play”. That fated day, I was with my fifteen year old nephew, Jacob and a couple of his life-long buddies, Will and Blaine who skateboarded and poked about. Their frail adolescence against the rotting remains of strangers’ lives at sunset was so rich with creepy possibility and graphic urgency…
We made this film with a skeleton crew, a micro-budget, and a cast of locals having no previous professional acting experience. Yet what we were missing in resources we compensated for with ingenuity, talent, and what seemed like some kind of magic.
Sunset Edge is a sort of Southern Gothic Graphic Novel, short on dialogue but with a wealth of symbolic language. A twisted plot reveals itself through dreamscapes and memories and lingers in your subconscious. For me the story was disturbingly personal but I feel the film’s timely themes of self-discovery amidst destruction and violence will touch many.