‘Hear ‘The Hole Story’
Movie: “The Hole Story”
Director: Alex Karpovsky
Genre: Fictumentary
Grade: B
Director Alex Karpovsky thought he would take independent film to a whole new level. Take a documentary style film and include some actors and it creates a hybrid “fictumentary” film, a documentary film with fictional elements.
“ The Hole Story” follows Alex, an aspiring director from Boston, who is funding his own project, “Provincial Puzzlers.” His plan is to film a pilot episode to send to networks to pick up. The idea of the show is that each week he will fly to a new city and investigate a new unsolved mystery.
The first episode is to solve the mystery of a half-mile wide hole that has appeared in the center of a frozen lake in Minnesota. The problem is, when they arrive, the hole has closed up with three to four inches ice. Since he has put his life savings into trying to use this hole as his starting point for his show, he tries to make do.
The film follows hilarious situations with Minnesota locals as Alex tries everything to make the TV show work. He tries to wait for the hole to reopen, but it only gets thicker. Finally getting desperate, he is forced to break into an amusement park to tape video footage in front of a giant Paul Bunyan statue.
“ The Hole Story” follows the journey of a man who digs himself into a hole throughout the movie, but tries to pull himself out of at the same time. Viewers will laugh at him and/or with him, yet they are along for the journey, the “hole” journey.
The film was one of the opening films at the Fargo Film Festival held this week.