W A R
synopsis
“This is the world after the end of a world... acre by acre, fence by fence, the war was lost.”

WAR is a simple film portrait of four characters looking for work in the abandoned lands of rural America. Shooting alone for almost five years on a hand-cranked movie camera without a producer, crew or budget, we assembled an unconventional narrative out of these character studies, attempting in limited means to reveal the drama of a disintegrating society.
"The word of the Lord is a burning fire..."

Pastor Jack Master drives down old county roads, stopping occasionally at the farm houses and trailers that spot the hills. He pretends to knock on the doors and invite people to his little New Life Church of God. He calls his wife from a payphone every few hours to check in and make sure the rapture hasn’t happened yet.
"I'll write down everything I've done
wrong that I can remember."

Jacob Jenkins is the fourth generation farmer of 218 acres off Egypt Hollow Road. Every spring he walks the full perimeter of his property checking the fence-line, looking for holes in the fence. As he makes this walk, he thinks of his life growing up on the farm and how his own home has, little by little, slipped out of his hands.
"If something goes wrong then pretty soon everything’s wrong and nothing works."

Hanky the Junkman operates the oil leases on Jacob’s farm. The central powers that pump the wells are maintained by an intricate balance of weights and counterweights, gears and pulleys. Hanky tries to keep everything in order, from the hills of scrap metal in his junkyard to random tree limbs fallen by the roadsides.

The four people who appear in the film are all residents of Warren County, Pennsylvania where the film was shot. Most of the locations that appear in the film no longer exist. The railroad bridge, where the final scene of the film takes place, was blown down in a wind storm; some oil pumps have been shut down; houses and barns have made way for trailer parks. This film archives the remnants and the present decline of an America, which nothing will replace.
the Kinzua bridge fell in 2003