Dead Man's Burden
| Dead Man's Burden | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Directed by | Jared Moshe |
| Produced by | Veronica Nickel |
| Written by | Jared Moshe |
| Starring |
Clare Bowen David Call Richard Riehle |
| Music by | H. Scott Salinas |
| Cinematography | Robert Hauer |
| Edited by | Jeff Israel |
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Production
company |
Illuminaria Productions
Stick! Pictures |
| Distributed by | Cinedigm Entertainment Group |
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Release date
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Dead Man's Burden is a 2012 Western film directed by Jared Moshe. The film premiered on June 16, 2012 at the Los Angeles Film Festival and stars Clare Bowen and Barlow Jacobs as two siblings that reunite over the death of their father and a potential sale of their land.
Martha (Clare Bowen) and her husband Heck (David Call) are two hardy settlers trying to survive in New Mexico after the end of the Civil War and the death of Martha's father. They're given hope for a better life when a mining company shows interest in purchasing their homestead, but things become tense when Martha's brother Wade (Barlow Jacobs), who defected to the Union Army returns home after hearing of their father's death- unaware that Martha herself was the one who brought about his demise.
When writing the script for Dead Man's Burden, Moshe wrote with the intent to cast the film with lesser known actors, as he didn't want "to bring in a big-name actor who didn’t look like they belong in that period." Moshe did not use storyboards, as the film had a tight budget and couldn't afford a storyboard artist, instead watching other Western films for inspiration and working closely with cinematographer Robert Hauer. Filming took place in New Mexico over an 18-day period, where the cast experienced freak storms that forced the cast to walk to the set but did not delay filming.
Critical reception has been mixed to positive and the film holds a rating of 76 on Metacritic (based on 12 reviews) and 76% on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 17 reviews). Common elements praised in the film was Moshé's choice in cast, which Variety lauded as a highlight. However, in their mostly positive review IndieWire remarked that the lack of major stars and the choice to film a Western (which they saw as a "mostly defunct genre") could jeopardize commercial prospects. The New York Daily News's review was more mixed, as they felt that the "verbose period film has the complicated plot and tight pacing of a cable TV drama, which is then squashed into an indie-film paradigm."
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Wikipedia