Welcome to Pine Hill

Welcome to Pine Hill is a feature length narrative film shot in a realist style using non actors. The story follows a young man living out his last days of an inevitably losing fight with cancer. Without no health care or a social network, he decides to make peace with the people who he has let down, been let down by or lost. He visits his former friends (drug dealers and gang bangers), his ex girlfriend and finally his estranged and angry mother. After years of struggling to get by, he has suddenly made a decision not demanded by forces outside his control.

He then goes to Pine Hill, a small town in upstate New York and sees nature for the first time. The next morning he walks to the trail head. When the sky has reddened with its last breaths of light he turns off the trail and walks with determination into the woods, finally free.

A meditation on one man's confrontation with mortality, Welcome to Pine Hill grapples with the injustices and problems of an African American immigrant who has to confront the many mistakes of his past. While often well-intentioned, his decisions were too often not thought through and the consequences harsh. Now, as he sees the imminent end and the certainty that none of those material goals will pay off, he works to free himself in a way that will be truly his own, for the first and last time.

Welcome to Pine Hill will be shot in a style similar to Prince/William. Shannon Harper, star of Prince/William, will be the star of Welcome to Pine Hill.

Here and below is a link to Prince/William

http://vimeo.com/10125717

Welcome to Pine Hill was borne out of the process of making Prince/William. In Prince/William I worked with a real situation and developed the movie through interactions and conversations with the people involved (Shannon Harper and me). The close contact with the social realities within which these (and all) events take place, spurred me to push this idea further. At the same time blurring of the lines between the real and fiction seemed to charge the politics and the emotional core of the story. Welcome to Pine Hill continues this process but instead of using a pre-existing situation combines a few situations to which I have been close and conversations with Shannon. Most of the people in the movie will be playing themselves in situations and locations very close to their everyday life. It is my hope that through this process I can create a movie that is at once a testament to the challenging and finally healing process of making the movie and an a story that reflects that difficulty and addresses life in a challenging and open way.

As a filmmaker I work to create films that are engaged with current socio-political realities while simultaneously touching upon the metaphysical questions of existence and freedom.

Tin Light Cooperative TLC was formed in the summer of 2009 by Keith Miller, Begonia Colomar and René Peñaloza Galván. Prince/William was one of the early projects of TLC. On June 28, 2010 René died of complications from cancer. Welcome to Pine Hill is being made in his honor.