NOMINEE - Grand Jury Prize - Slamdance Film Festival | OFFICIAL SELECTION - Camden International Film Festival
Mental Health • Cinema Vérité • Agriculture & Farming • Rural IssuesDate of Release: 2023 | Run Time: 82 minutes | Language: English | Captions: Yes | Includes: Transcript | Director: Tommy Hyde | Executive Producer: Aaron Woolf | Writers: Tommy Hyde & Aaron Woolf | Co-Producer: Kyra Schaefer
Doug’s ease with cows, dogs and people is a joy to behold. And when he trains his team of mutts on the family farm with a dream to compete at the world championships in Alaska, his teenage exuberance seems to erase the tired lines on his sixty-five-year-old face. Yet the demands of being a small-scale family farmer are constant, and Doug has never once left his cows for more than a few days in his entire life. On a cold March morning, Doug pulls out of his driveway in a rusted-out truck carrying 22 dogs, tearily waving goodbye to the only world he’s ever known. He’s bound for Alaska. The journey will prepare him for what he’ll confront when he gets back—the sale of his farm and a race to craft a new destiny. Meticulously captured over the course of a decade, UNDERDOG paints an intimate vérité portrait of Doug as he puts a curiously optimistic twist on the kinds of family farm tragedies that have marked American rural life.
Becca Balint, US Representative for VT
"What Underdog illuminates so well is the emotional toll of being a farmer today and the deep resilience, optimism and joy that also comes with rural life."
Middlebury College | Jay Parini, Axinn Professor of English
"A gorgeously conceived paean to rural America and its characters..."
Underdog Film Review | FILM THREAT
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