Knee Deep

USA 2007 / 81min.
Director Michael Chandler / Producer Michael Chandler, Sheila Canavan

If you travel through Maine and leave behind the familiar coast of summer vacations, you find yourself in a different Maine, the Maine of fields, farms, work and dirt.

This is where Josh Osborne was raised, on his family’s third-generation dairy farm in Farmington, with his mother, father, and two sisters. He worked on the farm every day for a dozen years on the promise that it would someday be his.

But things didn’t turn out that way. Which is why on a beautiful summer’s day, this 22-year-old farm boy found himself aiming a rifle at his mother. Or did he?

Drawing from verite footage, home movies, interviews, police tapes, crime scene videos, love letters, and re-creations, Knee Deep asks the question: Why would a son try to kill his mother? The answers are surprisingly tragic and comic.

Whilst set in Maine, Knee Deep could just as easily have been transported to rural New Zealand. The economic challenges of sustaining farming, the pressure faced by a younger generation expected to inherit a way of life and the heartache for some in the rapid increase of subdivision of rural land in favour of development; are shared currencies that will make this a particularly poignant watch for Kiwis.

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