Lee Lynch

Set in an abandoned exurb in Iceland, the film is a semi-fictional portrait of local teenager "Gunnar" who is obsessed with serial killers. As the filmmakers follow him around the derelict modernist dwellings a narrative emerges of Iceland's financial crisis as well as its precarious future. Collage elements are implemented in order to heighten the overall feeling of post-modernist dread and latent absurdism.

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A short 16mm movie based on my childhood memories of attending a reading of Everybody Needs a Rock, by Byrd Baylor. It was the question and answer session that really changed me.

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A folk-film directed by Lee Lynch and Christian Cummings about the mythological origins of Jack 'O' Lantern, from which the popular holiday trope derives.

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The Murder of Hi Good is a true-crime revisionist western set in Northern California, 1870. It details the eventual murder of California’s most notorious Indian hunter; Hiram Good. Most historians believe that his indentured servant “Indian Ned” killed him, a native boy whom he’d raised as a son. It’s suspected that Ned was influenced by the nearby Mill Creek Indians or “diggers”, who were struggling to eke out an existence on their ancestral lands.

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For five years, Schmitt and Lynch followed the buffalo hunt in the American West. Their fascinating portrait of a disappearing world contrasts unspoiled landscapes with commercial influences on the American myth.

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In 1885 two boys in Southern California discover a cave of Chumash Indian artefacts in the San Martin Mountains on land that is now part of the Chiquita Canyon landfill, located in the small town of Castaic. The cave is known as Bowers Cave, named after the amateur archaeologist Stephen Bower, a notorious looter of Indian sites, who bought the artefacts from the boys and then resold them for a profit, mostly to private collectors. Now, a small portion exists in the Peabody museum at Harvard.

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"The Wash is a portrait of the river wash that runs behind the older part of Newhall, California, where Lee and I used to live. We shot the wash on Super8 film and then finished it on video. It is a collaboration between us, describing the ways the wash is used, and the people who use it, ourselves included. It charts the way this land has changed since they began developing Newhall and the surrounding community of Valencia for housing, a development that is expected to bring over 250,000 more people into the area by the year 2015."

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A three-dimensional narrative enacted at the California Poppy Reserve. It’s part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmakers, Naomi Uman and Lee Lynch).

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Moving from Redding to Los Angeles, Roger and Lee Anne hope to make a better life. When their baby is born with a rare heart defect, they are forced to give up those dreams and make decisions that will give them stability. A landscape out of balance begins to emerge.

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Ovid's Pomona is film based on a Greek-myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

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THE BEE HIVE (2000) is a Super 8mm (sound) haiku-film about the discovery of nature. Made as an experimental scholastic film to better convey the aesthetics and wonderment of nature that the institutional science films of the filmmaker's childhood utterly failed to communicate.

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A modern fairy tale about the supposed "last Leprechaun". Directed by Lee Lynch and starring James Gibbons. Filmed in 1999 on Super 8mm.

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After a year of heartbreak and loneliness, Erin and Cal have forgotten enough of each other's flaws to get back together. They take what they hope will be a romantic camping trip in Sequoia National Park. Alone in the majestic landscape, they begin to revisit their past relationship. As cracks start to show each is left wondering whether the other has changed enough to make it work this time.

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Fresh out of the Navy, Pete Church returns to his hometown on Thanksgiving to track down an alcoholic father he hasn’t seen in years. Unable to pick up the scent on his own, he calls his older brother Bob who has remained in town building a business and a family. The estranged siblings hit a series of old bars, but while Pete is intent on finding their father, Bob just wants to drink and reconnect with his little brother. Along the way, they’re joined by Gene, a barroom hustler. He promises to lead the brothers to their father (as long as they buy the beer). Desperate, they accept Gene’s half-cocked guidance through the small town dives. As the quest falters, the drinking increases; old grievances arise, and the brothers must face the past and each other.

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A pair of Japanese siblings get stranded in small-town California and become friends with other twentysomethings they meet, despite the complete lack of a common verbal language.

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A man, disillusioned with his life and bored by his surroundings, mysteriously finds himself in a barren desert. After making his way back to civilization, and encountering a handful of local personalities, the man decides to abandon his former life and reinvent himself as the owner of a junkyard in a ghost town. After his initial euphoria subsides, loneliness and boredom set in, and the man is compelled to spend a few days in a nearby town. There he meets a waitress and her brother, who introduce him to another form of desert existence.

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A deeper exploration of the relationship between a young witch (Colette Weber Shaw) and an old witch (Marnie Weber) who has sold her soul to the devil.

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"The Wash is a portrait of the river wash that runs behind the older part of Newhall, California, where Lee and I used to live. We shot the wash on Super8 film and then finished it on video. It is a collaboration between us, describing the ways the wash is used, and the people who use it, ourselves included. It charts the way this land has changed since they began developing Newhall and the surrounding community of Valencia for housing, a development that is expected to bring over 250,000 more people into the area by the year 2015."

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