SCREENING: Box Elder

BOX ELDER RETURNS!

After an exceptional theatrical engagement last month, the Dobie theater has requested Midwest filmmaker Todd Sklar bring his groundbreaking distribution back to Austin for a limited engagement on April 21st 2008. Box Elder is his first independent feature-length film.

Superseding the festival circuit and a traditional platform release, Sklar is taking the film straight to the big screen in over 40 markets. The tour is part of Sklar’s unique distribution model, which focuses on niche-oriented, grass roots marketing by the filmmaker and his crew, while also working out mutually beneficial revenue-sharing deals with theaters across the country.

About Box Elder

At once painfully hilarious and delicately poignant, the film follows four best friends through their last years of college. Dependant on their parents financially, and on each other emotionally, they spend their time sleeping in, hanging out, and eating lots of sandwiches. Using break-ups and re-occurring scholastic failures to impose a quarter-life crisis, they take turns postponing responsibility, avoiding accountability, and looking for someone or something to substantiate their lives, all the while hedging their bets and mastering the art of treading water and getting away with it.

Box elder bugs are loud, scary looking, and dependent on group swarming. Yet, they’re also completely harmless and extremely passive aggressive. Using this metaphor to address a generation that thinks big, talks fast, and threatens to change the world, Box Elder is an unapologetic portrait of a youth movement at odds with its own ambivalence, exposing a generation defined by privilege, potential, and self-induced paralysis.

Shot in Columbia, Missouri on a shoe-string budget, Sklar’s debut feature is a collegiate love letter that not only paints an honest portrait of it’s subject matter, but also evokes the nostalgic yearning the film’s character’s revel in.