This week marks the release of the LA-based filmmaker Carson Lund’s feature film debut Eephus in the United States. To celebrate his audacious — and down-to-earth — new baseball film about community life in New Hampshire, we’ve decided to present his earlier short documentary Starr Farm.

Starr Farm was shot at a lakeside cottage in New England where Lund’s family hosts a reunion every summer. The reunion Lund captures in the film coincided with a July 4th weekend and his Great Uncle Art’s 80th birthday celebration. His detailed cinematography traces the weekend through a series of snapshots — spontaneous run-ins among relatives, leaves blowing in the wind, ripples seen across the lake, children chattering, fireworks against the night sky — that offer an impressionistic window into his family clan’s summertime rituals.

“I wanted to create a fluid film that openly acknowledged my presence as cameraman and creator, imperfect and mediated as that presence may have been. I wanted to allow themes and motifs to converse with each other organically without making any strong implications of my own through montage or audiovisual manipulations.” CARSON LUND

 

Although Lund has always been interested in formalism — “my high school efforts look like Z-grade Béla Tarr films” — his approach in Starr Farm, as in his newest film, is much looser and associative. “When I started cutting, I adhered to certain formal patterns,” Lund wrote in his Director’s Statement. “But then as I sat with the material longer and longer, other syntheses, rhymes, themes, and arcs rose to the surface.” The end result is a freewheeling portrait of a place and its people — as attuned to the specifics of the former as it is with the idiosyncrasies of the latter.

Carson Lund is an LA-based director and cinematographer. He is part of the Omnes Collective — a growing community of filmmakers interested in making films about community and cultural decay in the 21st century. Lund has acted as a cinematographer on a number of his peers’ works, including Jonathan Davies’ Topology of Sirens and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas in Miller’s Point (2024). His own directorial debut, Eephus, premiered at last year’s Cannes in Director’s Fortnight. The film has since earned rave reviews from critics and popular acclaim from audiences for its heartfelt representation of two rival recreational baseball teams facing off one last time.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.