IN THE HOLLOW, short hybrid documentary (15 mins)

Director/Editor/Writer: Austin Bunn

Producers: Austin Bunn, Bob Hazen, Spencer Gillis, Chris Cocco

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Screenings: Inside Out 2015 (Toronto) -- Audience Prize Best Short Documentary, Frameline 2015 (San Francisco), Honolulu Rainbow Film festival, Provincetown International Film Festival, Iris Prize (UK)  -- Runner Up, Best Short Film, Newfest (NY) -- Audience Prize Best Short Documentary, Miami-Fort Lauderdale LGBT Film Festival - Jury Prize, USN|Expo (Sardinia, IT) -- Best Short Film, ReelQ (PA), OutEast Film Festival (Halifax, CA), Milwaukee Film Festival (WI), Atlanta Out on Film (GA), ImageOut (Rochester, NY), Sacramento LGBT Film Festival (CA), Top Drawer (Dayton, OH), DocUTAH (UT), Sidewalk/Shout Film Festival (Birmingham, AL), and others.

SYNOPSIS

In May 1988, girlfriends Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were attacked while hiking the Appalachian Trail by a ‘mountain man’ named Stephen Roy Carr. Combining documentary and narrative material, IN THE HOLLOW tells the story of the shooting, Wight’s death, and Brenner’s desperate survival (and later transformation into an advocate for hate crime legislation in the U.S.) as she returns to the trail for the first time since the shooting.

Director Austin Bunn (screenwriter, KILL YOUR DARLINGS; writer/producer, LAVENDER HILL (short documentary)) combines documentary materials and narrative film elements, using the actual locations on the trail and dramatizations co-written by Claudia Brenner based on her testimony. The film follows Brenner as she hikes the Appalachian Trail, twenty-six years later, in search of the site of the shooting and path of her survival. Shot five times, Claudia Brenner eventually became a victim’s advocate and a passionate campaigner for the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, the first piece of Federal legislation in the history of hate crime legislation in America.

Funded by: Cornell Council for the Arts, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, The Zwickler Memorial Fund, The Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell's Feminist Gender & Sexuality Studies and LGBT Studies Departments. Produced with the assistance of The Center for Independent Documentary.