colin spoelman

Colin Spoelman is a screenwriter, director, and producer living and working in New York City. His produced films have been seen at film festivals around the world. This site is designed to provide information about those finished films, those nearing completion, and more in development. If you are interested in knowing more about any of these projects, please send an email.

news

July 2008 -- The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, has just been selected for the 2008 IFP Film Week in the emerging narrative section.

bio

Colin Spoelman hails from Eastern Kentucky, where he grew up the son of a Presbyterian minister in Harlan, a small coal-mining town. He left the mountains for Yale, where he majored in Theater Studies and Architecture. Colin graduated in 2001 and now lives in New York where he is a writer, producer, and director.

In 2002, he wrote and produced Coming Down the Mountain, a narrative short that explores the prescription drug abuse epidemic in his native Appalachia. Shot in Whitesburg, Kentucky, the 35mm film follows a father and son who feel trapped by the lush green mountains that make up their rural home. The film premiered at the prestigious Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France and has played at such venues as the Cork Film Festival (Ireland), The Florida Film Festival, the Hamptons Film Festival, LA Shortsfest, Mill Valley, the San Francisco INDIEfest, and the Rural Route Film Festival in New York, where the film won best narrative short.

Also in 2002, he and a classmate started a small production company, Cyan Pictures. Cyan’s first film, I Love Your Work, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2003 and appeared at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The film stars Christina Ricci, Giovani Ribisi, Vince Vaughn, and Joshua Jackson, and was directed by Adam Goldberg. The film was acquired by Thinkfilm and debuted in New York and LA theaters in December 2005 and is now available on DVD.

Most recently, Colin has been working on Underground, a narrative feature he wrote and directed about a group of college students who become trapped in a cave in rural Kentucky. Shot over a week in a cave system near Lexington, the cast of five actors and crew of four traversed miles of cave passage, braving tight crawling passages, bats, spiders, sheer drops, constant darkness, and a freezing cold underground river. Shot entirely on DV, the documentary-style narrative explores the psychological terror of being trapped underground with no food, limited water, and dying flashlights. The film is currently being edited and will debut at festivals in fall 2008.

Colin has written a feature version of Coming Down the Mountain, a southern comedy entitled Friend of the Family (co-authored by James Ponsoldt), and REM, a dark thriller about psychology students who discover a drug that will enable them to experience waking consciousness within their dreams. Additionally, he has written, Ellwood, a play that suggests Confederate General Stonewall Jackson (who was mistakenly killed by his own troops) was deliberately assassinated by Southern soldiers who were disenchanted with the course of the war. The play looks at how poverty, politics and religion interact in the minds of soldiers.

Other film credits include Porn n' Chicken (Associate Producer) a made for television movie that appeared on Comedy Central in 2002 and Alone (Line Producer), a short that premiered at the 2004 IFP Market in New York. An occasional but serious actor, Colin recently played the leading male role in Mother Courage and her Children by Bertolt Brecht, at the Columbia School of Drama, directed by Meiyin Wang and the parts of the ineffectual brother in C4: The Chekhov Project produced by the Alternate Theater and Theaterwagon.