A nursing home aide makes ends meet by reselling his patients’ prescriptions in Director Braden King’s drama, The Evening Hour.
Set in a small West Virginia mining town in the foothills southern Appalachia, King’s film tells the story of Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer who cares for the old and infirm in his community, but also sells their excess painkillers to local addicts to make ends meet.
His life is further unbalanced when an old friend returns with dangerous new plans that threaten the fragile balance Cole has crafted, driving him to action to save the tight-knit fabric of family, friendship, land and history that binds everything and everyone he loves.
On October 9, after the DGA membership screening in New York, King discussed the making of The Evening Hour during a Q&A moderated by Director Nicole Kassell (A Little Bit of Heaven).
During the conversation, King elaborated on what he referred to as a “little bit of a perverse transcendence of a traditional structure” in the editing process for the film. “I was very focused on wanting to see the kind of emotional weather change on the actors’ faces within the take, rather than kind of jumping back and forth. So, there’s a lot of time spent watching people listen and absorb information and emotions that felt a little unusual as we were putting the film together and probably requires a certain amount of patience. But the performances that the actors gave were so remarkable in that respect, it was something that I felt like I really wanted to try to honor by not making it too ‘cutty’ and really being able to spend time with those characters.”
King’s other directorial credits include the documentaries, The Film That Buys the Cinema, Homeland: The Story of the Lark, Looking for a Thrill: An Anthology of Inspiration, and Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back. His feature, Here, earned him a Grand Jury Prize nomination at the 2011 Sundance film festival.
King has been a DGA member since 2007.