Filmmaker: Jim Haverkamp
Film: Willow Garden & Other Shorts
April 23-May 01, 2008
About the filmmaker:
Jim Haverkamp is a filmmaker and editor based in Durham, NC. He co-produced and co-edited the documentary feature Monster Road, currently screening on the Sundance Channel. His short films have shown at over 50 film festivals worldwide, including Black Maria, Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground, Big Muddy, and MicroCineFest. He is a freelance video editor and teaches at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.
About the film:
In 1740s Northern Ireland, a young man becomes ensnared in a deadly love triangle and must decide whether to follow his heart or his father's twisted advice. Shot in an expressionistic, film noir style, Willow Garden tells the backstory of one of America's strangest murder ballads.
Willow Garden began as a stage play by Don Henderson Baker. Fascinated by the song 'Willow Garden'--a murder ballad in which the protagonist stabs, poisons, and drowns his love, with little explanation as to why--Baker set out to provide a backstory for such a gruesome tale. He imagined the story's origins as a complex mix of passion and religious zealotry, embodied by the character John E. McCorkle, a Scottish Protestant lord and set in Northern Ireland among the same "Scotch Irish" community that eventually helped settle the Appalachian area.
For the film version, Baker and Jim Haverkamp decided to shoot the story in a very simplified, stylized setting. Rather than try to recreate exact period details, they instead strip away as many elements of the set as possible. The striking black and white cinematography by Steve Daniels accentuates the theatricality of the world and gives the film the feeling of a dark fable, fueled by the characters' elemental passions.
In addition to Willow Garden, Southern Circuit attendees will also have a chance to see Last Pack (watch on YouTube), No Money Down (watch on YouTube), and other short films from earlier in Haverkamp's career.
Opening Short:
Moth to Light
Directed by Elizabeth Strickler (Fiction)
Through a dark and tense atmosphere twists the horrific coming of age of Muriel. Caught between the domestic world of her mother and a dark and luring force in the garden, she contemplates what to do with the baby her mother dotes on and whose origins are unknown.
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