Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Wild Life of a Minnesota Adventurer

In the pantheon of indie Director's Statements, Minnesota filmmaker Mike Scholtz's ranks right up there for top honors of 2012.

His framing of Wild Bill's Run, a feature documentary involving snowmobiles, marijuana and a bygone American era reads:

If any mad scientists are reading this, please contact me immediately. I’m very interested in becoming a test subject for your time machine, particularly if it can take me back to the year 1972.
That’s why Wild Bill's Run plays like a lost relic from the 1970s. The story is firmly rooted in my favorite decade. The film includes more than 20 minutes of never-before-seen 16mm footage of the Arctic shot in 1972 and 1973. And the score was composed almost entirely on a Moog analog synthesizer.



Scholtz's film screens this afternoon at the South Dakota Film Festival, where it was voted Best Feature Documentary. It won a similar award at Seattle's True Independent Film Festival and is set to premiere in Canada tomorrow at the Yellowknife International Film Festival.

The tale of an adventurer who tried to snowmobile during the Cold War from Minnesota to Moscow, and then switched to a life of clandestine crime, seems too fantastic to believe. Almost as crazy as the idea of running a film festival out of a 95-year-old MN barn, something Scholtz is also intricately involved with.

[Wild Bill's Run]

No comments:

Post a Comment