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More than a Mantra: 1on1 with Father Ed Leahy (BENEDICT MEN)

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‘What hurts my brother or sister hurts me.’

Simple and powerful, that phrase provides the foundation of the educational environment at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey. Led by Father Ed Leahy, St. Benedict’s is structured around its foundational belief in community and mutual accountability. As the subject of the new documentary series, Benedict Men, the staff of St. Benedict’s and their students have built a new kind of school environment that Father Leahy insists is built around empowering youth within safe, spiritual community.

“The underpinnings in the school are community leadership, tending to the heart and academics,” Father Leahy explains. “Those four columns, so to speak, hold the thing up. Creating communities is what is essential to what we do, because it’s what has been destroyed largely in our country right now. Any sense of togetherness, of working towards a common goal, of giving up what you want for what we need, ‘whatever hurts my brother or sister hurts me’. That kind of sense is what’s completely absent in the country. So, we do it.” 

“I tell people all the time, we have a fence around our property and some people think it keeps the monks in or it keeps the bad people out. It doesn’t do either of those. It really marks off Holy ground. It’s a space where we can treat each other differently and be a sign to the world of what’s possible. [It’s] not because of our own strength, but because of the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It allows it to happen that it’s possible to have people of different ethnicities and faiths [to come together]. We’re mostly Christian, but we have large Muslim, Hindu and Jewish populations. It’s… a sign of faith and God’s love to the city and to its environment. That’s all we’re trying to do, but the community is the fundamental part of what does that. We’re all climbing the same mountain. It’s about faith. It’s not about religion. Religion is what gets us killing each other. Faith won’t do that.” 

Currently airing on Quibi, Benedict Men is a documentary that delves into the lives of the students at St. Benedict’s. As the school’s basketball team drives toward its latest championship, the youth are challenged to learn the meaning of brotherhood in all aspects of life.

Even so, while the power of community sounds good, it helps no one if it’s left simply as a mantra. However, what’s most impressive about St. Benedict’s is the fact that doing ‘life together’ has become embedded into every aspect of school life. For Father Leahy, much of establishing community stems from empowering students to use their voice and help participate in leadership themselves.

“The voice of the kids is what’s essential,” Father Leahy expounds. “So, we work hard in trying to help young people of color discover their voice or amplify their voice, which is exactly why I’m so happy about this piece and Steph Curry’s involvement in it. Steph Curry’s voice is being heard in a different way now… I think what’s happening in the country right now is you’ve got guys like Steph, LeBron and others… [who] are using their voice to raise issues and to cause people think, hopefully, in another way. So, leadership here amplifying the voices is what’s essential.“

“So, the kids run the place day to day,” he continues. “They’re responsible for the community and the decisions that get made within the context of community. It works. Our job, as adults, is to protect them from making decisions that will harm them in the long run or harm them physically Outside of that, they can, they make any decisions they need to make.” 

Of course, with any form of leadership development, differences of opinions can create conflict between the youth. For these instances, Father Leahy believes that the school must be a safe space for the youth to express themselves and take responsibility for their actions where necessary.

“You have to have a community of trust that allows for criticism,” he feels. “Mark Taylor, who’s tremendous coach, [will] take the ball [in the locker room] after every game, and anybody who wants it can get it for the purpose of ‘call outs’ or ‘shout outs’. So, you can either say something positive about another’s performance (or about your own) [with] a shout out, or you could give a call out. If somebody’s somebody screwed up or you did, you can admit that or you can say that to somebody else. It’s unbelievably effective to watch it in a locker room. It’s ingenious… We have a school meeting every day… We meet face to face. We don’t have any loud speakers where talking voices are coming out of the walls at you. So, we can deal with any issues that we need to deal with straight up, face to face, all together. It works.” 

While the emphasis of Benedict Men may focus on the success and obstacles faced by the school’s basketball team, Father Leahy understands that sports are only one part of their lives. In fact, he believes that the school’s job is to prepare their students for life outside their walls as best as possible. By encouraging the students to envision their future beyond the world of sports and fame, Father Leahy wants to them to avoid the stereotypical false dreams that he argues are being sold to African American youth. To him, these ‘hoops dreams’ that have been sold by the media have become a form of ‘nouveau slavery’ insofar as they turn students into products.

“[Modern basketball] is a nouveau slavery in that it’s essentially the buying and selling, so to speak, of African American kids,” Father Leahy begins. “It’s horrible. It even causes adults to begin to see teenagers as assets. I’ve seen it, even with parents. Parents can begin to see their sons as an asset rather than their son. And this doesn’t happen just in basketball. It happens in all youth sports now. There are a million people in the world that could be his coach or her coach. There’s only one that can be his father and there’s only one that can be his mother. Be his mother, be his father. Don’t be his coach. Don’t be as agent. Be his parent. That doesn’t happen a lot of times.” 

“It’s even more difficult in a situation where many of our kids are subject to a system of government that puts more African American men in jail than any place else in the world. (It puts more people in jail than any place else in the world!) So, lots of kids are living without their fathers. It’s a huge problem, because moms begin to worry that they’re going to lose them to the street. Moms began to grip even tighter to hang on to them at a time and an age emotionally when a kid is trying to separate from mom. It creates huge tensions, suffering, and resentment to operate in young men.”

With this in mind, it’s also important to Father Leahy that they care for the emotional and spiritual of their youth as well. As the third philosophical column supporting their school structure, ‘tending to the heart’ has become an essential component of the teen’s development.

“We have a pretty extensive counseling center that 40% of our kids will contact… at some time during the year,” Father Leahy enlightens. “We run small groups around topics like, the kids call themselves, Unknown Sons, [who are] kids with absent fathers. Another group is called Blues Men. They’re kids who suffer from depression. Another one is Ala-Teen, [who are] kids who are affected by somebody with substance abuse. There’s an anger management group… And then we have face to face, one on one therapy as well. It’s interesting. You see kids whose academic performance is horrible. Once they begin to deal with the issues of their heart, you can watch their grades go up like a thermometer. It’s amazing. The problem is nobody’s doing that in schools and the anger that exists in so many black and brown men in this country doesn’t addressed. They feel like nobody pays any attention and… in order to get people’s attention in this country, you have to turn over a car or something. It shouldn’t be that way. So, the leadership structure and the counseling center are huge in charge of giving these guys and girls agency.”

Similarly, Father Leahy also claims that the false narratives spread to the youth set up undo pressure on today’s African American youth to succeed in the world of sports. In this way, one of the aspects of Benedict Men that he appreciates most is the fact that the series does not shy away from the realities and struggles that the students face from the outside world.

“What the story tells you though, is the pressure that’s put on 16 and 17-year-old kids and should never be put on them,” he contends. “The only way that a guy like (basketball player and student) Zarique Nutter sees himself getting out and being able to help his mother is by being a basketball player. That’s horrible. Why is that the only way? But that’s the only way that it’s presented to these kids because of the media. What do they say? The media is controlled by white people, by the way, right? What do [the students] think? They see basketball players, football players, and entertainers. They don’t see the possibility of being a banker, a neurosurgeon, a dentist or anything other than an athlete or an entertainer. It’s just not presented with that. There’s nothing around them that gives them that notion that they can achieve. So, a guy like Zarique is up against it, living in that difficulty and feeling a responsibility to Mom to use this talent… A 16-year-old is not supposed to be doing that but this country forces that on African American and Latino guys. It’s not right. It’s a shame. I think [Benedict Men director] Jonathan Hock told a great story because he pointed it out… Until we get it figured out, we’re going to have big, big problems… It’s a damn shame that nobody wants to understand the sufferings of the other. Until we can do that, that’s going to be rough sledding. That’s my feel.”

Benedict Men is now available on Quibi.

Wrestling with Relationships: 1on1 with Zach Woods (DAVID)

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It’s always hard to navigate family relationships… but when our home life collides with the work world, things can become even murkier.

This tension between the professional and domestic worlds is the basis of David, the new short film written and directed by Zach Woods. Best known for his work on comedies such as Silicon Valley, The Office, and Avenue 5, David puts Woods in the director’s chair for the first time and tells the story of a therapist (Will Ferrell) who is struggling to find the balance between work and life. In the midst of a session with depressed patient, David (William Jackson Harper), Ferrell’s son David (Fred Hechinger) arrives and demands that his father leave work to attend his big wrestling match. As the two men argue about priorities, personal and professional relationships collide and Ferrell’s character must navigate which is most important to attend to in that moment. 

Because his father worked as a counsellor, Woods has a unique perspective on the experience that he brought to the script. On a deeper level though, his interest for the piece lay in exploring the messiness of human relationships.

“In real life, my father’s a therapist, so I’m familiar with that setting,” Woods begins. “My relationship with my dad isn’t really anything like the one in the movie and I obviously I’ve never wrestled before. (If I had wrestled, I would still be in traction, even if I did it in high school. [laughs]) I think that I’ve always thought therapists’ offices were kind of interesting situations and sort of the myth of the therapist’s complete lack of means. Therapy is so based on this sort of fiction that the caretaking dynamics only flow one way. I just think that’s so interesting when the therapist’s humanity comes leaking in through the pipe, basically.” 

“More broadly, I guess I’m really interested in messiness, basically, and how, in order to be close to people, you have to endure messiness like your own and theirs. At a time when there’s so many fantasies of perfectibility, when we’re constantly sort of performing our lives for each other in these ways that feel slightly disingenuous sometimes, the idea of three people having to negotiate their respective messes and figure out how everyone can get fed in the way that they need was interesting to me, I guess.”

As a director, it can always be a challenge to get the best out of your cast. However, as his first time behind the camera, one might expect that Woods would be even more nervous. However, Woods explains that his experience was quite the opposite as each cast member was ready to engage the material fully from the outset.

“Surprisingly, it really wasn’t [hard to work with them],” he marvels. “I think it’s because they were so gracious and generous with their talent and their time and beyond that, just showing up. There’s way in which, as an actor, you can show up physically, but not spiritually. You can be there in body, but not in spirit and that’s almost worse than just not doing it in the first place. There’s like sort of two levels of commitment. When someone signs on for a project, there’s something where they say, ‘I will be at this place at this time’. Then, there’s the other much more daunting form of commitment, which is to show up with your whole heart. When somebody does that, it’s infectious. If I am there and I’m vulnerable and really invested and you’re acting across from me, that gives you permission to then be equally exposed. But it’s kind of like someone has to take the first leap. It’s like skinny dipping or something. Someone has to run into the water first. Sometimes, on set, it can take days of waiting for people to run into the water. In this case, it was like all three of them were charging for the water from the get-go. From a director’s perspective, that is a gift.” 

Central to the film is Ferrell’s therapist who finds himself caught between his love for his family and his commitment to his patients. Reflecting on the complexity of these relationships, Wood believes that the core of these relationships remains a healthy form of supportive love.

“I think [relationships are] really complicated. I think, with good therapists, love sort of is the active ingredient. Not love that’s boundary breaking but, I think that the therapists I’ve had who have helped me in my life, a lot of it has been [due to] their insight, expertise and clinical perspective, but a lot of it has just been [due to my] feeling cared about. I think that’s a real relationship. It’s not really transactional. If someone goes to a therapist for help and the therapist is trying to help them, I think that’s a deeply human connection. So, it’s tricky when your family shows up and you also hopefully have a deeper human connection with them too.” 

With this in mind, Woods believes that one of the great challenges of human relationships is one’s ability to understand the world from another’s perspective. As we attempt to empathize with one another’s struggles, he believes that there are many who struggle with a deep-seeded fear that to do so may somehow result in the value of their views getting lost in the process.

“Sometimes I think there’s an attitude of empathy that you have a finite amount (and maybe you do). I hope you don’t,” Woods posits. “I hope empathy just grows on itself. But I think that sometimes it feels like, ‘if I empathize with you, no one’s going to empathize with me’ or if I empathize with that person, then I won’t empathize with the person they hurt. It’s like you have an empathy allowance that has to be budgeted carefully and I think that makes people sort of… cautious, at least about stepping outside of their own perspective because they’re scared. They’re like, if I care about you, is anyone going to care about me? If I think about it from your perspective, will my perspective get completely disappeared in the process?” 

“I think it’s a huge leap of faith. That’s also why wrestling was the metaphor for me. Boxing is so beautiful and elegant to me (almost like a ballet) and wrestling, I always thought was just two guys on the floor, grunting and rolling around. It’s so messy and inelegant looking from a layman’s perspective. I think that’s more akin to my experience of being close to people, which is just like struggling, sweating and smashing your face into someone else’s back [as you] try to figure out how to exist together and not to get pushed out of the ring, basically. It’s a little bit of a bloody business, but I think it’s worth it.”

In this particular scenario, all three characters have complex motivations that affect their relationships with one another in any number of ways. Asked if there’s a character that he connects with the most, Woods argues that there’s a part of him that has related to each of them at different various of his life.

“[I connect with] all three of them.,” he explains. “I’ve felt like the therapist before in my life where I [had] the feeling of [that] I’m doing my best and it’s not enough. The panic of being yourself, coming up short with a loved one and not knowing how to do better and feeling the shame and rage of that. I felt that before. But the patient feeling so identified with his own fragility. he’s saying like, ‘I’m starting to think maybe this isn’t a failure. This is who I am.’ I think trying to separate from your own misery is challenging and I’ve struggled with that before… The son, I know I can relate to the idea of I’m not leaving here until I get the connections. I’m down for the fight and I’m not going anywhere. Maybe you’ve said there’s not enough go around, but there has to be enough to go around.” 

“I think language can be a maze as much as it’s a bridge, right?,” he continues. “It can separate us as much as it can connect us. For example, the therapist [in David] says that whole thing about [how] you can say something and it releases a toxin into their ecosystem of the relationship and blah, blah, blah. It all sounds very pretty and sort of eloquent in a brutal way, but a truthful one. Then, it’s one of my favorite moments is because of… the way William Jackson Harper listens and says ‘Is that true?’. It’s not accusatory or anything. He’s just kind of skeptical because it doesn’t ring true. Then he stands up and he holds him. At a certain point, language is a little bit of a crude tool for the task at hand and you have to just touch people… So, I think that I found [that feeling] very relatable. It’s coming to the end of language’s utility and needing other tools.” 

Tightly written and performed, David is an entertaining but poignant piece that deserves its day in the sun. However, unlike feature-length films, it can be a challenge getting shorts in front of an audience. Even so, Woods is excited about the response to David and remains optimistic that others will get their chance to see it.

“[The film] got chosen for Cannes, which then got canceled, but then I heard whispers about maybe there’s they’re actually are going to try to do something… So, they’re selling it to various tv stations in Europe and festivals. It’s just the festival route. Then, I hopefully we’ll find a way to get it to the widest possible audience. Like anything you want people to see the stuff that you care about.” 

David premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is touring festivals now.

Fragile Dreams: 1on1 with Jack Mulhern (ODD MAN RUSH)

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While all sports have their passionate diehards, Jack Mulhern knows there’s something special about hockey fans.

Whether their home team has just won the Stanley Cup or if they’ve gone over 50 years without winning it all (sigh, sorry Leafs), hockey seems to connect deeply with the soul of its fans in ways that other sports don’t. As the star of the new hockey rom-com Odd Man Rush, Mulhern believes that what continues to draw people to the sport is the combative nature of the game and the offbeat personalities of the players.

“It’s gladiatorial [and] a very physical sport,” he considers. “We’re very clannish kind of a species. We like to duke it out with the neighbors, you know? I think there’s that. I think also [people are passionate about the sport] because, from my limited experience, hockey players are nuts, but in the best way. They’re like a bunch of loons, but they’re like really good guys. I guess it’s like this a lot of the time with a lot of really serious athletes. They’re really good, wholesome people that are just insane because they’ve pursued it so far that they’re just kind of caught in all these rituals and all these quirks of being. They’re fun, little character studies being around, specifically, hockey players.” 

Odd Man Rush, tells the story of Bobby Sanders (Mulhern), a young hockey player who dreams of playing in the NHL. When his young career ends with more surgeries than goals, Bobby finds himself playing in the European minor leagues. Moving from team to team (and traded for a washer/dryer combo), Bobby lives his life in a constant state of change. Things begin to turn around for him when he finally lands in Sweden and meets Elin (Elektra Jansson Kilby), a check out girl who helps him to confront the reality of his childhood dreams. 

Though he had some experience in the world of hockey in his youth, star Jack Mulhern found the most relatable aspect of his character was his journey slugging it out in the trenches in order to achieve success.

“I played in middle school and followed the Rangers a little bit because I’m from New York, but I’m not [a] crazy [fan],” he explains. “Luckily again, there was a lot of people that are the real deal. Dylan [Playfair] is the real deal. Bill [Keenan], obviously, and a bunch of the other guys. I could lean on them whenever I had any questions. Other than that though, there were a lot of parallels in terms of being sort of a young, ambitious guy jumping around in the minor leagues, chasing this dream to being a young actor, jumping around from gig to gig to gig. So, I found a lot of parallels there, you know?”

When Odd Man Rush provided the opportunity to revisit the hockey world, Mulhern became excited to hit the ice once again. Training with co-star Dylan Playfair, he took every opportunity that he had in the brief preparation time to reacquaint himself with the sport.

“I think I had maybe two weeks after I jumped off of this to go back,” he recalls. “Luckily, I had some equipment downstairs. Weirdly enough (or serendipitously), the previous year I was in a pilot that was close to going and one of the themes is that the character played hockey. So, I started going out to Chelsea Piers and playing pick up again, breaking in some skates and stuff like that. So, weirdly, I started that process a year before and, when this happened, I kind of was ready to go. I showed up a week in advance [to get] as much time as I could get together and Dylan was out there. He stayed with me every single day leading up to the beginning of production. So, shout out to Dylan. He’s the best.”

While Odd Man Rush may be a romantic comedy, it still takes its hockey responsibilities seriously. Giving the film an added sense of pedigree, the cast features numerous former players/coaches, including members of hockey’s royal families in Trevor Gretzky and Alexa Lemieux. As a relative newcomer to the hockey scene, Mulhern feels that the opportunity to work with people who have lived in that world reminded him what a rabid fan-base the sport carries with it.

“Trevor [Gretzky]’s a great guy. I really like him,” Mulhern begins. “I think what I took away was the reactions to those kids of those legends is how much [people care], which makes perfect sense because it’s Gretzky and Lemieux that we’re talking about. People really care. There’s a cult of personality around it. Same thing with Dylan. Dylan’s on this great show called Letterkenny. We’d be practicing a lot or shooting in a lot of rinks and, off the rink, crowds would form slowly of these other guys practicing and rotating in and out on different rinks in whatever facility we were at. So, every single time we’d get out, we’d be mobbed by people. So, hockey fans are the real deal. You don’t want to piss off hockey fans.”

Whether in sports or the arts, films that showcase dreamers who yearn to make it in the big leagues often highlight the joy of ultimately reaching their goal.  However, while Odd Man Rush does mimic some of these tropes, it also looks at the fragility of those dreams in the face of injuries and the simple realities of playing professional hockey. 

“The downside is ostracizing the people in your life by becoming a kind of a shell of a person because you’re so consumed with satisfying this sort of abstract ambition that you have for yourself,” Mulhern reflects. “It puts a lot of strains on the relationships, not just because of travel and because you’re busy all the time, but because you’re so consumed that you kind of can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s the same thing in acting, I’m sure (or at least the connection that I made into the character). You sort of forsake life in the pursuit of life. That’s the ambition trap, and it’s something I’ve been trying to navigate for these past four or five years that I’ve been doing this for a living too. I haven’t quite gotten it dialed yet but I’m getting better though.”

“Ultimately, none of it matters if you don’t have peace of mind [or] if you’re a miserable person,” he continues. “You could be the most successful person in the world and it’s all for not. When you will have paid such a hefty price to get somewhere, and all this stuff that really matters is gone by the time you get there. [That’s] not to say that everybody that ever satisfies the full extent of their dream and makes it to the NHL is a hollow shell of a person. But I find that those people that last, are [the ones that mind] their P’s and their Q’s. They know what matters, and they’re able to juggle things in a mature way.”

With the film’s emphasis on dreaming big, Odd Man Rush features a brief but important subplot where a very young Bobby writes a letter to his future adult self. Asked what he would say if he were given the chance to speak to his childhood self, Mulhern believes that he would likely encourage young Jack to make the most of every moment early in order to pursue his ultimate goal.

“Everything that I did or was involved in kind of got me to where I’m at now and it’s necessary,” he says. “I think I do regret [that] I didn’t want to be much of anything until I was in my twenties and I was forced to, because I was so down. If I could go back, things like education and all of these things are really just a consolidated group of resources. So, what I would advise myself or to any young person going through it is that, as much as you might think it sucks, try to be about the business now of finding those things that you’re really passionate about. Pursue it while you have the youth and the time to really kind of make the most out of everything around you and go to school for it too. That would be my advice.” 

Since his experience on Odd Man Rush gave Mulhern the chance to rekindle an interest in a sport that has eluded him since his childhood, it’s fun for him to envision who he would like to play alongside. Were he given the opportunity to pick a fictional three-man roster of his own, Mulhern offered some surprising and unique choices.

“I liked [Brian] Gionta on the [New Jersey] Devil’s, back when I was playing. I liked him because I was short and he was smaller, really scrappy and a good player. So Gionta and [Henrik] Lunquist ‘tending. And Gretzky. Shout out to Trevor’s dad.”

For complete audio of our conversation with Jack Mulhern, click here.

Odd Man Rush is available on VOD now.

Political Gain (and Games): 1on1 with Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (BOYS STATE)

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The political world is filled with men and women who both seek power for the sake of serve and help others or, more negatively, out of a need to self-validate by winning. Pending on the candidate’s goals and intentions, they can prove themselves to be agents for positive change or simply succumb to the immaturity of their youth.

But what does it look like when youth are the ones with the political power?

Directed by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the new documentary Boys State takes the viewer behind the scenes at Boys State, a summer leadership program for teenage men, developed by The American Legion. (The film indicates that there is also a Girls State program but the filmmakers opt to only follow the boys.) With over a thousand teenage boys in attendance, the youth are challenged to build a representative government from the ground up. As the young men nominate and elect candidates, they also must decide what means—and requires—to win. Asked how they discovered Boys State, Moss claims that their interest was piqued back in 2017 when the events of the camp garnered national attention.

“We feel lucky to have stumbled upon Boys State as a prism to look at American politics and democracy today,” Moss begins. “We didn’t have the benefit of participating in the program as young people growing up in California. I just didn’t know about it. It wasn’t until we read about the program the Texas Boys State program, having voted to secede from the union becoming something of a scandal [in 2017] in the national news [that it] caught our eye. That was at a time that we, like a lot of Americans, were struggling to understand the irreconcilable political division in our country and how have we gotten to this point? What’s our way forward? I think [we saw] in Boys State and Texas, potentially a prism to look at these questions and look at how susceptible young men are to sort of the rhetoric of the moment and what they may offer us as a hope forward.” 

When the boys first arrive, they are split between two political parties, the Federalists and the Nationalists. However, despite the division, they are given no other political guidelines or priorities to build upon. Left to decide for themselves what they value, it’s fascinating to see how different the political ideologies can be amongst the youth. In developing their film, political diversity became a high priority for McBaine and Moss as they chose their subjects to follow.

“When we did find out about this program, we loved the idea that there’s this space where kids with politics to the right and to the left, [who] are [invited] and forced to come together and talk politics face to face,” McBaine explains. “There are so few of those spaces left, maybe not even the Thanksgiving table anymore in a family. So, we knew going in that it was going to be fraught and we hoped it would be. We knew it would be uncomfortable. It would be really interesting to see what went down if they voted to secede in 2017, what the heck were they going to do in 2018? But there’s 1,100 kids who were invited to attend every year and that’s a lot of people.” 

“We knew the only way we were going to be able to survive this event as something occurs and as a crew trying to cover it, but also emotionally. The kind of films we make really are character driven. We wanted to immerse ourselves with a small group, and we wanted that small group to have a diversity of not only background in life experience, but also different politics. So, we worked very hard over three months, criss-crossing Texas, and filming with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of boys, until we found the four that we do end up following through the program, all of whom are very different and surprise us. We’re very lucky we found the four that we did.”

Although Boys State seems to consist of a form of hyperreality of the political world, it does offer a window into the machinations of backroom Washington and the games that are often played behind the scenes. However, given the age of the participants, it begs the question of whether or not the young men took their experience seriously. While the sheer number of youth ensured a range in maturity, Moss claims that he was impressed just how important the experience was to many of the boys.

“I think there was both [mature and immature youth]. Actually, what’s interesting is you see both embodied in Robert himself,” he points out. “[Robert’s] not sure if he should take the process seriously or play to the cheap seats. I love that sort of just to work it out for himself and he realizes that he’s miscalculated and that Steven has actually taken it more seriously than he has. I love that discovery (Robert’s discovery and our discovery) that he’s been trying to figure it out. We were attracted to young men who take politics seriously. No doubt, all of them do. Robert had been a page in the U S Senate. Stephen had worked on political campaigns. Ben, as you know, had a Ronald Reagan doll on his bookshelf and is a political junkie. Renee is already like a grownup and taking activism and politics seriously. So we connected with their serious commitment to the political process and caring about it. No doubt that we saw boys that don’t take it seriously. You see them pass legislation about Prius drivers going to Oklahoma and pineapple pizza. That’s funny, but then actually got serious. I think that tension in Robert, in the group (and maybe our country as a whole) is really sort of reflective, right? It is actually kind of where we’re at. People want to go to Washington and blow up the system, whatever that means. We’re left with a bunch of rubble or they want to kind of come together and figure it out. Those ideologies are in contest at Boys State and exaggerated form.” 

“They’re also 17, right?” reminds McBaine. “We’re also making a coming-of-age film. I think that straddle of boyhood and headed towards manhood thing is a space we also wanted to visit frankly and check in with. So, to some degree, the serious unserious is part of their everyday in everything they do, let alone what happens.”

Similarly, one of the most fascinating explorations within Boys State becomes the drive for power. Although being elected within their system offers no real weight outside of Boys State, the drive to victory becomes a purpose unto itself for many of the youth. Asked what they saw regarding the pressure of obtaining power, Moss feels their experience shows that, while some people are simply willing to do whatever it takes to win, others do understand the importance of serving in political office.

“I think no doubt this kind of lust for power for power sake is something we’re living with and the consequences of that now in a very profound and unsettling way,” says Moss. “I love the moment where Steven has asked, ‘What is the purpose of a politician?’ (He’s campaigning for signatures on his ballot.) He says ‘To serve others and not themselves.’ That simple and yet profound definition is something we all need to remind ourselves about. I think you see it in Ben (and he would recognize it now himself with some perspective) that there’s a kind of corrosive aspect to winning an election at all costs for the sake of winning. He really embodies that in his strategy and his tactics. He’s brilliant at it. He even invokes some military kind of metaphors and talks about politics and winning as combined arms warfare, sort of exaggerated kind of violence to politics. So, confronting that and actually hearing Ben’s direct bluntness about it was shocking. But I think also what gave us hope was to see young men of color like Renee and Steven who have very different politics than the mainstream at Boys State rise to power because they have a positive vision. That sort of power for a purpose, if you will, was very hopeful for us to see not only them offer that vision, but to see their vision return in the support of the electorate.”

Since the experience consists of 1,100 young men battling for political gamesmanship, the film also feels like a window into youthful (and potentially toxic) masculinity. Filmed at the time surrounding the MeToo movement of 2018, McBaine notes that, while she didn’t know what to expect, she was encouraged by what she saw in some of the young men.

“We went with all these questions about democracy and hyperpolarization, and what are [the next generation are] taking in, and what they’re seeing in adult state,” she clarifies. “I think what we didn’t quite realize until we got into the room with 1,100 boys, that we also had this incredible window into boyhood. [It was] 2018. I guess if I thought hard enough beforehand, I would have realized this is what we’re going to see, but not until I got there did I really have to confront that we were making a film about masculinity on some level. I’ve never been in a space like that. Myself and two other cinematographers I think we were the only females for miles around. There was plenty on display there that kind of met my expectations for good or for bad about what I would see.” 

“In checking in on boyhood in 2018, around the era of MeToo, around conversations about toxic masculinity [and] what they’re seeing in politics in Washington, I knew I was going to see a certain amount of it. Some of it was going to scare the heck out of me and some of it was going to upset me. What I wasn’t totally prepared for—and I love this about what I do for a living—is that I then also saw and experienced all kinds of masculinity I hadn’t expected to see. And that really did involve a lot more empathy. Not just from Steven, this was really in a lot more spaces around the event than I thought, [with] listening and real emotion, frankly. It was an emotional week that I didn’t think was going to be an emotional week. That too has power in that space, and truly profound power. The connections that were made between some of these boys was really heartening, frankly and made me less worried about the men of the future… We want to do [Girls State] next. I don’t really have any good intel on what happens in those spaces yet, but we plan to soon.” 

When he considers whether or not their experience at Boys State has changed their view of the current political system, Moss believes that the film shows the type of maturity and growth within the participants that gives him hope for the future.

“I think we both wanted, on some level, a Hollywood ending to our story,” Moss reflects. “Actually, it was a process to accept what the outcome was, but we found it actually ultimately very uplifting that it’s a struggle. Stephen will continue to fight for what he believes in and he has so much to offer both in he himself, um, but in what he embodies and will inspire in others. Renee as well, what’s also been great to see is how much reflection Ben has brought to his behavior two years ago at Boys’ State and now he recognizes the corrosive impact of such politics on our body politic. He’s really disavowed that kind of politicking and the gamesmanship. I think that kind of moral growth we need as a country, he shown us in person, and that’s also really hopeful. Just the fact that we can still all get together, Ben, Renee, Steven, Robert, and kind of talk in a small form embodies what I hope for us as a country. We may not agree on everything, but at least come together and find out as Steven would say, what can we agree on? I’m sure there is something.”

Boys State is available on AppleTV+ now.

The Owners Director Shows What Happens When We Lack Real Connection

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French director Julius Berg’s directorial debut provides a cinematic translation of the graphic novel Une nuit de pleine lune by Hermann and Yves H. Starring Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams, the film follows three would-be thieves as they case the home of an elderly couple, who prove to be more dangerous (and more intelligent) than the thieves. Set in a sprawling home in the British countryside, the film builds slowly to a fiery climax.

Berg references the first film he truly loved, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, as a film that the visible part of the story (a lost alien and a boy find friendship) hides the deeper part (how the boy is dealing with the separation of his parents in divorce). It’s not lost on me that his debut film provides us some of the stereotypical elements of a horror/thriller, but that there’s more going on here than just the action on screen.

“The social and generational conflict between the young and old, the poor and rich, plays out here,” Berg explained. “We have this feeling that this old, visibly sweet couple protects a darker secret — that the three young robbers who appear nasty are nothing compared to the people who appear to be victims.”

Berg aimed to build a slow burning plot that keeps the audience waiting. “There’s a versatility to the characters,” he said, “and we need lots of different clues about what is really going on, and only showed them one at a time, slowly. So, some of the real behaviors were hidden, and we’re blind to the true behavior of the couple.”

“One detail isn’t enough to warn the robbers, or us, until it’s too late. They should have been more open-minded and focused on the truth. I wanted to make a psychological thriller that hinges on manipulation.”

When asked what lessons audiences might take away from the film, Berg pauses, before admitting that the young robbers find themselves in trouble because they’ve failed to see the connection between themselves, the other, and the rest of the world. He believes we might even see something of ourselves in the film, and be challenged.

“Maybe viewers can find enough motivation to see the part of the whole world and what their heightened life could be,” mused the director. “A painter can use rich colors, but in collaboration, you can use rich colors that you can’t find on your own. All of us are kind of painters.”

“The couple takes control of the house and turns the tables because they are connected, while the robbers are disconnected. They are able to play with the robbers’ conflict and manipulate them.”

Be warned: The Owners are not what they appear – and arrive in Theaters, On Demand and Digital on September 4, 2020.