Blaine Dunkley - Director of Photography
Winner — Best Documentary Short, RiverRun International Film Festival 2024 (Academy Award qualifying)
Official Selection — Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2024 · Mountainfilm 2024 · Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Iranian-American filmmaker Andy Sarjahani and his childhood friend Bubba Samuels grew up together in Pope County, Arkansas. Over the years, they bonded over their love for dogs and adventuring in the hills, woods, and creeks of their native Ozarks.
After 9/11, an 18-year-old Andy must reconcile the identity he hid to assimilate as a boy, while Bubba takes a diverging path. In the years following, anti-Middle Eastern rhetoric from the community they grew up in fuels a journey of self-examination as Andy moves through life straddling a cultural fault line, attempting to reconcile his two worlds.
In Wild Hogs and Saffron, the two old friends reconnect in their native Ozarks for a wild hog hunt where unexpected conversations unfold that have a lasting impact on their friendship. Set against the backdrop of the natural world, masculine vulnerability within a traditionally hypermasculine space drives the story as the two men cross new thresholds attempting to make sense of a polarized world.
I followed Andy and Bubba through the hunt itself and then stayed close for the conversation that followed, two old friends talking across a political and cultural divide that had grown between them since childhood. The coverage had to move between the two: the physical, unpredictable work of the hunt, and the long, quiet exchange that the whole film turns on. Shot handheld on a Sony FX9 with G-series zooms and an Easyrig, a setup light enough to stay with them in the field and steady enough to hold the talk when it came.
Network — ITVS / PBS Independent Lens
Production — Big Sun Films
Director — Andy Sarjahani
Producer — Jennifer Samani
Director of Photography — Blaine Dunkley