Past Featuresd Films

Fence Dogs
(EXPERIMENTAL, 10 minutes)

Living in the aftermath of a decimating factory fire, our faceless protagonist searches for Oreo, a runaway dog.  Through his quest we bear witness to the town's subsequent squalor, revisiting the sites and stories of a once promising economic landscape.  Through the lens of this short experimental film, we see the degeneration through his eyes, a post-millennia Tom Joad of sorts, and choke on the grit of the technologically-inept rust bowl he now inhabits.  The truth his search will excavate is fiercer than the fire that brought the town to its knees.  Oreo was a good dog, but even he could sense the fences.

Filmmaker Profile: Christopher Holmes

Christopher J. Holmes is an MFA candidate in Film and Video Production at UNC-Greensboro.  Along with Fence Dogs, he has also directed the short films The Metal Detector and Solid State toward completion of his degree.  A native of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio—the same town that produced visionary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and rock vanguards Devo—Christopher earned his BA in Electronic Media Production at the University of Akron.  There he was awarded the University's Sam Ella Dukes Memorial Poetry Prize in 2001. 

Local Angles

• Filmmaker Christopher Holmes is originally from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, but moved to Greensboro to pursue his master's in film and video production at UNC-Greensboro.
• The still photos, cinematography, and videography used in the film were shot largely in North Carolina—including the towns of Greensboro, Summerfield, and Sea Grove, NC. 
• Frank Levering, the narrator of Fence Dogs, owns Levering Orchards in Ararat, VA and co-produces the current PBS series "Simple Living", based in Mount Airy, NC.  He also attended high school in Mount Airy.
• The film was an official selection of the Carolina Film and Video Festival in February 2004.