Hollywood Reporter review

‘Foxhole’: Film Review | Oldenburg 2021
Jack Fessenden’s sophomore feature casts the same group of actors as soldiers in three different wars.

By John Defore, SEPT 15, 2021 10:00PM

A triptych of vignettes set in places where exhaustion, tedium, fear and duty collide to make moral reasoning difficult, Foxhole marks the second feature so far by a filmmaker barely out of his teens. Jack Fessenden (son of genre fixture Larry, a producer here) wears many hats, most of them very well, teaming with a fine cast to deliver a war film where happy endings may be imagined but bloody ones are never in doubt.

The protagonists are Americans caught in three different conflicts: the Civil War, World War I, and Iraq. The same actors play characters with the same names in each episode (with slight variations), but while some similarities of temperament carry over from one incarnation to the next, that’s as far as the overlap goes.

DP Collin Brazie gives each segment a distinct, era-appropriate look, making the most of a clearly tiny budget. In keeping with the confinement of the titular setting, where soldiers huddle in illusory, or at best temporary, shelter, the drama has the intimacy of a theatrical production and could very easily have been staged that way. (Fessenden will eventually open the film up a bit, making good dramatic use of exterior location shots.)

Each scene is a five-man drama, with enemy soldiers introduced when necessary. One of the men is replaced by a woman in Iraq, reflecting contemporary realities, and the script accommodates the changing nature of service for the Black character(s) played by Motell Gyn Foster: Jackson is a sergeant in Iraq; can’t carry a rifle to the front in World War I; and is a “buffalo soldier” separated from his fellow troops in the first episode.

That first episode offers our protagonists the film’s most charged debate. This time around, Jackson didn’t start out in the foxhole with the four other Union soldiers: He staggered in from elsewhere, very badly wounded, claiming to have fought with a rebel and to know where his regiments are located. The nearest doctor who could help him is five miles away, and a frightened young recruit named Clark (Cody Kostro) says there’s no use trying to get him there: They’d endanger themselves, and the field hospital may well refuse to treat a Black man anyway. The group’s eldest member, Wilson (James Le Gros, wielding moral authority in all three episodes), argues the other side.

The men are more evenly split the second time around, when a German soldier stumbles into their shelter and, caught, tries to surrender. Kill the man as if he were attacking, or treat him humanely as a prisoner? Does it matter if he has battlefield intel he can share? As the German, Alex Breaux is hard to read, which isn’t quite enough to make us side with Morton (Alex Hurt), who’s sure the man will endanger them if he’s not killed on the spot.

Where the two historical episodes directly address both doubts and the self-motivating idealism soldiers experience (in the first, a letter home sounds just like one from Ken Burns’ The Civil War; in the second, Wilson has to remind his comrades they’re “representing the United States of America”), the third has little room for ideals beyond survival — albeit a vision of survival in which the possibility of leaving the wounded behind doesn’t even come up for discussion.

A Humvee piloted by Gale (Andi Matichak) is ambushed when its spotter/gunner (Angus O’Brien’s Conrad, a beacon of righteous behavior in previous episodes) takes his eyes off the road. Five Marines sit in the increasingly claustrophobic transport (Fessenden’s frames grow tighter as the minutes pass), shooting into a distance that is so sun-blasted it’s completely invisible to the camera — a common-sense solution to budgetary constraints that doesn’t lessen suspense in the least and, in fact, serves the action well. With his leg pinned in a way that makes moving him potentially fatal, Wilson is stoic while Jackson strategizes against an unknown number of attackers. Will their convoy return for them, or is this vehicle the last home they’ll ever know?

Throughout, Fessenden directs and edits tense dialogue sequences with skill, only once letting an actor stretch his performance slightly beyond the film’s dramatic gamut. He’s a bit less successful as the picture’s composer: Though the music itself suits the action well — like any good prodigy, Fessenden also has a nascent music career — it’s too prominent in the sound mix, sometimes trying too hard to push us toward emotional responses we’re already having. But this is a small complaint against a movie that almost entirely rises to the height of its ambitions. Let other films argue whether war is ever defensible or pit one conflict’s righteousness against another’s; Foxhole cares about the individuals tasked with fighting, in the hours that challenge them most.

NWZ review (Google Translate from German)

Oldenburg - powerlessness, inner turmoil, despair, fear and the question of the meaningfulness of their actions: the viewer in the film “Foxhole” is very close to the emotions and thoughts of American soldiers. “Foxhole” celebrates its world premiere at the 28th Oldenburg Film Festival.

The US independent work (95 minutes) by director Jack Fessenden, who was only 19 when it was shot in 2019, accompanies three small groups of soldiers in the American Civil War, World War I (black and white) and Iraq. "Foxhole" pulls the viewer right into the action. The consequences of the decisions that the US soldiers have to make weigh heavily, e.g. when it comes to the question of how to deal with a prisoner. Excessive demands, fear of death, mistrust, questions of morality and attitude, the unpredictability of the moment - all this is the subject of “Foxhole”. It is also interesting that in the three Chapters / episodes of the film the same actors are used, and thereby demonstrate a great variability in their representations.

What the life of the soldiers looked like before the war, what makes them tick as a private person, does not play a major role here, it is the emotional impact of the moment that counts. It may not always be easy to identify with individual characters, but “Foxhole” has a pull. It's an amazingly mature and reflective film for such a young director.

Instead of a sprawling plot with a variety of visual values and scene changes, he focuses on the tense emotional world of the soldiers, e.g. in the trench enclosed by a smoke screen or in a humvee that drives through the Iraqi desert under the glaring sun. Again and again with close-up. Men and close-ups worked, longer shots, quiet moments in which the soldiers' gazes tell from their inner life. The permanent threat situation creates anxiety, especially since the enemy is mostly invisible. Suddenly shots fall out of nowhere. Chaos breaks out. The war is within reach.

Kino-Zeit review (Google Translate from German)

FOXHOLE (2021)
A film review by Bianka-Isabell Scharmann

THE PRESERVATION OF HUMANITY

A meadow traversed by ditches in the fog, a mud hole fenced in by barbed wire at night, a humvee rolling under a rolling sun, three theaters of war, three “foxholes”: the American Civil War, World War I and one of the desert wars of the past 20 years are fast (Iraq or Afghanistan are almost irrelevant) identified, it's about America. These three scenes become arenas for questions of moral principle.

Since the 1910s at the latest, war has been part of the history of film in the form of news, as a documentary film or as narrative mass spectacle. While the heroization of the winners is part of the fixed repertoire - often of American color - there are also anti-war films or satires again and again. I'm thinking of Stanley Kubrick's Paths to Fame or Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Now Jack Fessenden, screenwriter, director and also responsible for editing and music, a newcomer - and war films are expensive because of the crowd scenes, the locations to be re-enacted. You can tell from the film that Foxhole was produced on a budget: the cast is small, the special effects simple. But it is precisely this reduction that makes the economic decisions aesthetically interesting and Foxhole a focused, intelligent and thoughtful film. Reduced to a technical spectacle, something emerges that is overlooked or neglected in all the explosive spectacle: that wars demand everything morally, ethically, and humanly from the actors in the field.

Foxhole's means of choice is to turn concrete moral conflicts into a dump for larger political issues. Do the white soldiers help a wounded African American who, when the war is over, “will probably have it better than before?” Do the Americans shoot a German spy on the spot, a de facto execution - a war crime - or do they take him prisoner? Will fire open on civilians who have come to collect, mourn, and bury their dead? All these concrete questions arise in the discussion between the members of the groups on the question of the meaninglessness or meaninglessness of their own actions. “What are you fighting for?” The black soldier is asked in the First World War. “For the same thing as you: democracy.” In the war of positions, where enemies still clash in their humanity, personal interaction is possible in order to recognize one another, in the last episode the enemy - the one outside - remains invisible. “Why the hell are we still out here?” The answer “orders” replaces the conviction that we are fighting for something with the simple execution of actions. And so the moral undermining of American politics becomes visible in all its clarity.

Inside + Out interview with Jack Fessenden

HOLLYWOOD ON THE HUDSON
With Jack Fessenden, Film Director
Hosted by Meira Blaustein, Co-Founder, Executive & Artistic Director Woodstock Film Festival

Writer-director-actor-composer Jack Fessenden was born into the film industry, frequently visiting the indie-horror sets of his father, Larry Fessenden. He made his first feature film, Stray Bullets when he was just 15 years old and still in high school, causing Indiewire to name him one of “11 Filmmakers 30 or Under You Need to Know.” He most recently produced and directed Foxhole which will have its U.S. Premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival.  He is currently a student at Wesleyan University.

As part of our Hollywood on the Hudson series, we sat down with Jack Fessenden and Woodstock Film Festival Co-Founder and Artistic Director, Meira Blaustein, to discuss the draw of, and rebellion against, filmmaking in the digital age, what it was like to grow up surrounded by the film industry, and the real-life family story that inspired Foxhole, which was shot here in Woodstock, NY.

Meira Blaustein: I know that you grew up in a film family. Your father is a filmmaker, your mother is a stop motion animator. Can you talk a little bit about growing into the film world? And when did you move from watching films to wanting to make movies?

Jack Fessenden: I started making movies when I was seven or eight years old. My dad and I, and my friends would run around with a point-and-shoot handy cam. 

Meira Blaustein: Can you tell me a little bit about what made you interested in filmmaking rather than film watching?

Jack Fessenden: Well, I grew up visiting the sets that my parents were working on– these were usually horror movies produced by my dad. And earlier on, my mom was working as a production designer, art director, and always, you know, serving the movie in some way or other. My dad was running the show from behind the camera or acting, so I grew up visiting these movie sets like Stake Land, which was shot here in the Hudson Valley, and I grew accustomed to being on set. I remember learning what a DP was, and why the director wasn’t the one pushing record on the camera. That interested me because I always loved shooting or playing around with cameras. And so, spending time on those sets was very influential, because they really felt like a family affair with small crews and intimate sets. And they were lots of fun for me. I was just a little kid that got to run around because I was the producer’s kid.

Around age seven or eight, I started to make my own little movies with a point-and-shoot still camera. I’d go out with my friends. And we had Nerf guns or foam swords that we would play with, running around in the woods. And I made lots of shorts that way. When I was 12, or 13, it occurred to me that I really cared about this more than just a form of play. It started to become a passion and I got more into scripting the stories instead of just running out and doing it on a whim. I made my first short film, Riding Shotgun, with my friend Alex Hoffman. That showed at the Woodstock Film Festival, but it was a very long short. It’s a zombie-buddy movie, you probably remember it. A 32-minute short film, which is very bloated for a short, and I remember you told me you didn’t think it will be able to play at the festival, it’s just too long. I was crestfallen. But nonetheless, you came to my screening and said, “Well, we have to find a way to play this! So, you put it before a feature, Birth of the Living Dead, a documentary about Night of the Living Dead. That was 2013, and my first taste of having a real audience sitting in the theater. Luckily it was packed, and while the seats were filled for another film, they were all-genre lovers. And once I got the taste of showing the movie that I’d made to an audience, I wanted more. So, I kept making shorts all throughout my middle school and high school years. In my first year of high school, I shot Stray Bullets. So that was the trajectory. It really turned from a form of play when I was a kid with my parents helping, into a real working passion. At age 13, I knew this is what I do.

Meira Blaustein: Jack, as a young person who has been working in film now for quite some time, you now go to college, where I’m sure your friends and colleagues are making films. You must have your own point of view of not only where filmmaking stands now, but where it’s going. Talk a little bit about this.

Jack Fessenden: Well, I certainly feel like I grew up in a time when digital filmmaking made everything so much more accessible. I mean, I was able, when I was 12 and 13, to be shooting on DSLRs that looked fantastic. And with the advent of digital cameras that were cheap, and looked great in low light, you could make anything. Movies started to look really good that was made for very little money, on digital. That’s the world I grew up in, and most of my peers grew up making movies like that.

I go to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The film studies program there is primarily a studies program with theory and lots of watching. But towards the end, you get to shoot on black and white 16, and then you shoot a thesis in color, which is what I’m about to do this Fall. I think there’s actually an aura among the filmmakers there, that is more rebellious against the digital age. We all edit on these old Steenbeck machines, which is, of course, how it was done until the 80s or 90s. A lot of us react against some of the trends in digital filmmaking–or streaming where everything goes straight to streaming. We grew up in love with going to the movies! I feel like the people that are making the decisions of day and date releases; like Dune, the biggest action epic of the year, is going to be on our phones the same day it’s in the theater–I think that’s appalling. People in my generation are upset that this is the direction cinema is going. To me, it seems the people making these choices are older people who think this is what people want, everything at their fingertips. Whereas really, the people who like watching movies my age, I mean everyone I know, would rather go to the theater. That’s the feeling I get from being at Wesleyan surrounded by “film kids” as they’re called. Of course, things being accessible all over the place is a positive thing. I always try to go to the movie theater whenever I can, but it’s also nice to be able to go on my TV. As far as the future of the movie industry? There are always going to be good movies. People are always going to be making their art no matter when they were born or where. So, I think that the state of the movie industry is okay.

Meira Blaustein: Can you talk a little bit about Foxhole which is going to have its U.S. premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival. It’s a very interesting and ambitious film that was shot in one place, but the span of it is huge. Can you talk a little bit about where the idea come from and the whole production aspect?

Jack Fessenden: The seed of that movie was a story that I heard from my grandfather’s friend who he served with in World War II. This guy named Morton was sheltering from artillery fire in a small foxhole in the Battle of the Bulge. And in jumps a German soldier, looking to also shelter from artillery fire in this hole. They draw their weapons but end up spending the entire night together because they’re just trying to survive. And of course, the German can speak English, so they talk and find they have a lot in common. This is all they have at that moment, so they form this bond. And then as the story goes; at dawn, they part ways. I think the American might have turned him in as a prisoner but I’m not sure. Years later in America, Morton, is in a convenience store in upstate New York and he’s feeling like this guy in a suit is following him. And he finally turns around and asks, “Who are you”? And they have this moment of recognition. It’s the German soldier. He tracked him down because he remembered him from that night. Turns out the soldier immigrated to the United States to be a professor or something. The two remained friends for the rest of their life. I heard that story around the time my grandpa passed away when I was like, 14, and I knew that I had to make that into a movie. But of course, that seemed like a short film, two guys in a hole with a little epilogue of their meeting, and I was going to make it with my friend who spoke German. It was just going to be one of my short films. And then Stray Bullets came along. When I was finishing that movie, around age 16, I turned to Foxhole and I thought, well, I want to make another feature, this seems like the track I’m on now. I’m feeling ambitious, I’m ready.

I love war history, but I didn’t want to focus on one period. What if I told a similar story three different times, in different time periods using the same actors, the same characters, but just transplanted them from one time in place to the next. That was the structure I came up with — a three-act anthology that has since become more of a continuous film. I started writing the scripts for Foxhole when I was in high school and shot it the summer after my first year in college 2019 and finished it in January this year. So, it’s been a long process for me. I see many different versions of myself reflected in the film.

Foxhole, we shot it up here, right in that field in Woodstock in the Hudson Valley. The original seed of the film, the soul of the movie, has remained the same for these five years. I had an amazing cast; they really brought the film to life. I mean, it’s a lot of sitting in a hole. That’s the whole movie, so I needed good actors and they were fantastic, found by our casting director, Lois Drabkin. We dug a hole out in that field. We put up a big tent because I was determined to create a controlled environment where we can have lights and atmosphere fog. One of the wars is set in a thick fog which turned out to be a real ordeal both production and post-production, rotoscoping and all this kind of thing. But we shot all three periods in that tent. And then I edited the film on my laptop in my dorm room at Wesleyan and I started to compose the music. I have always composed the scores to my films because my dad used to tell me you can’t use copyrighted music, that’s a bad habit to get into, so I just did it myself. This one proved to be a lot harder because I wanted something more traditionally orchestral. Usually, my scores have been ambient moody stuff but this one warranted a bit more of a traditional orchestral approach. It was a lot to undertake for me, you know, doing string arrangements and a whole feature’s worth of music. And luckily for me, COVID hit, and I had all this time. I was editing it on my laptop at Wesleyan when we heard that we’re all going home for COVID. The whole post-production process sort of exploded and we had no idea when this was going to be finished. There were no deadlines anymore. It was a mixed blessing. I had a lot more time to write the music and to work on the sound, and everyone was kind of like we need work, and, you know, the whole crew is local. Finally, in January, almost a year after I thought it would have been done, I finished it. And I think the movie ultimately benefited from that extra time. So now I’m excited to be showing it at the Woodstock Film Festival, coming back to Woodstock, which is always very fun. And yeah, looking forward to having the whole crew and cast there.

WINNER “BEST ULTRA INDIE” The Woodstock Film Festival

Jurors
Filmmaker Alex Smith, Filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann, Editor Sabine Hoffman

Jury Statement
"For its technical and political ambition, ability to compel and surprise, and inventive use of cinematic tools on a minimal budget, the jury awards the Ultra Indie Award to FOXHOLE, directed by Jack Fessenden. We appreciated the way Fessenden rotated his actors to create three different stories of military life in three distinct historical moments, injecting questions of race and gender into a genre that is too often all-white and all-male. This is a deft and accomplished piece of work."

INTERVIEW WITH JACK FESSENDEN in SOUNDUNDVISION 8 November 2021

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER ANNOUNCEMENT Veteran’s Day 11 Nov, 2021

Samuel Goldwyn Films Nabs War Pic ‘Foxhole’ (Exclusive)
Jack Fessenden's film captures Americans caught in three different conflicts: the U.S. Civil War, World War I and the Iraq war.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired the North American rights to Jack Fessenden’s war film Foxhole after a world premiere at Oldenberg.

The drama — which stars Motell Gyn Foster, Alex Hurt and Cody Kostro — over a span of 36 hours captures Americans in three separate wars — the U.S. Civil War, World War I and the Iraq war. Foxhole follows a small group of soldiers trapped in a confined space as they grapple with morality, futility and volatile combat.

The movie casts the same five actors in each of the three wars as the film captures changing roles of race and gender with each conflict. The ensemble cast for Foxhole includes Angus O’Brien, Andi Matichak, Alex Breaux and James Le Gros.

Bleiberg Entertainment acquired the international rights to the follow-up feature to Fessenden’s Stray Bullets. “I am thrilled that Foxhole will reach its audience through Samuel Goldwyn and Bleiberg Entertainment. The film has been my passion for many years and I could not be more excited to share it with the world,” Fessenden said in a statement.

In its Oldenberg festival review, The Hollywood Reporter said of Foxhole: “Fessenden directs and edits tense dialogue sequences with skill” as the film “rises to the heights of its ambitions.” Foxhole was produced by Fessenden’s father and genre fixture Larry Fessenden through his New York based indie shingle Glass Eye Pix, along with Adam Scherr of Nous Entertainment.

The producer credits are shared by James Felix McKenney and Chris Ingvordsen, while Franklin Laviola and Scott Russo executive produce, along with co-executive producers Andrew Mer and Jack Foley.

Negotiations for the filmmakers were handled by Jerry Dasti and Mel Pudig.