About

Logline

As two couples leave their city life for the mountains, they discover their new home is not as welcoming as they first thought. Growing increasingly isolated in the vastness of the terrain, they find themselves marked by the trapped souls that haunt the forest and echo across time.

Directors’ Statement

This film was generated in a time of desperation to create. During the first peak of the pandemic, we recognized a pivotal moment to prioritize collaboration and take responsibility for our own artistic growth… and not lose our minds in the process. We had both moved out of NYC with our partners, and needed to work through all of the complex feelings the year 2020 elicited in us. Over zoom, we, along with four of our friends, wrote and edited the script, and then planned the shoot from top to bottom. On set, the six of us comprised every department except sound; we were the actors, grips, craft services, camera operators, and everything in between. We called in favors and worked hard to make a film with almost nothing, and through the growing pains, created a piece of which we can be proud. Since filming, we have continued to work primarily over zoom with our editor, composer, sound designer and special effects collaborator. This has brought forth some unique challenges, but has allowed us to continue to make our art (and grow our families) without the necessity of living in New York; A model we hope to continue as we progress and create in the future.
Come Home was shot with just one 27mm lens in the vast and desolate Adirondack Mountains. By giving ourselves a rigid structure of limitations, we were able to focus on the main themes of the piece: estrangement and exclusion, how we allow spaces to define our reality, and nature’s ability to create, destroy, and transform. We juxtaposed intimate human moments with large scale landscapes to create a meditation on loneliness. By allowing the land to become a protagonist, its own violent history of ownership and retaliation becomes twisted into the tapestry of the characters’ feeling of otherness. Our main influences came from the vast landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, the stark, detail-oriented filmmaking of Robert Eggers and Jane Campion, and the folk tales of the Adirondack region.
Our movie is a meditation on what the land can contain; the history, the stories, the love… the loss. It is not a picture of America, but a reflection; one that makes us contend with the piece of land we stand on now, and who may or may not be trapped there. We are aiming for the audience to confront not only their own alienation and discomfort, but the narrative of the terrain on which they live their lives. Our country is wild and has a story to tell if we are ready to listen.

- C. Zoz & N. Pursell