Lost Love, Community and Bears Abound in Campfire
Austin Bunn’s Campfire was recently featured on ShortoftheWeek.com and sparked a flurry of interest within the bear community. Check out our analysis below.
Campfire initially debuted in April 2023 and had a successful run through the film festival circuit, ultimately winning Best LGBT Short Film at the Cleveland International Film Festival and Best LGBT Subject award from the Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival. Admittedly the film escaped our notice until it appeared on Short of the Week at the end of June upon which bears took to it like catnip! And its easy to see why.
The film utilizes a docu-fiction format and follows the story of a handsome daddy bear named Carl, a straight, married dairy farmer who goes to Hillside, a gay campground in New Milford, Pennsylvania in order to find Marty, his long-lost love. Carl’s journey to reconnect with Marty leads to explosive and poignant results and touches on a storyline familiar to many older bears who may have started out or continue to live in closeted circumstances. As we follow Carl on his adventure Bunn interweaves interviews with the owners and attendees of the camp, highlighting its vital place in the gay culture of the region.
As reported by Rob Munday of Short of the Week, Austin Bunn initially sought out to make a straight documentary on the beloved campground but found that after a few weeks of filming that a central story for the film had not yet emerged; and then fate seemingly intervened, supplying Austin with inspiration for the storyline.
Apparently, Bunn received a call from a friend of his late father’s who had served with him in the Air Force during the 1950s. After learning of Austin’s father’s death, he was compelled to reach out and confess that he and Austin’s dad were lovers for years and at 83 years old the man wanted someone to know the truth about this romance that had defined his life.
Stunned by such an unexpected revelation, Austin channeled his feelings into art and created Carl who was a composite of his father and several other men he encountered while making the film.
Carl was played by bear heartthrob Mark Rowe who rendered a sincere and impactful performance of a man yearning to reconnect with an abandoned part of himself while simultaneously looking for an authentic way forward as a husband, father and grandfather. He was aptly supported by his costars which included Brain Keane of the BearCity trilogy.
Besides that, the film is a visual love letter to Hillside which has been serving the gay male community from the Endless Mountain region of Northeastern Pennsylvania for nearly 40 years. Bears love a good campground, as we all know, and Hillside has been a celebrated respite for our community since its inception.
See Campfire in its entirety HERE.
It’s great to see that Austin Bunn’s quasi-documentary short film Campfire, a paean to Hillside Campgrounds and to love and affection among bears, is getting the recognition it deserves. Austin invited me to its first, pre-release, screening at Ithaca’s arthouse theater Cinemapolis. Austin has a huge following of admirers among his students at Cornell–borne out by the fact the theater was packed. I first became of his talents as a screenwriter when I saw Kill All Your Darlings. The film tells the story of the original Beats—Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac (an early heartthrob of mine) and William Burroughs—when they were very young and struggling to become artists. The film focuses on the mostly overlooked “fourth Beat,” Lucien Carr, a very dark and manipulative individual. Bunn blends facts and speculation about the mysterious circumstances of the murder of David Kamerer, Carr’s lover at the time. This chapter is rarely, if ever, mentioned in academic studies of the Beats. The movie is riveting from start to finish. I think it is an unfortunately underrated film. If you liked Campfire, then you’ll be moved by Kill All Your Darlings. Kudos to Austin for the well-deserved exposure his film work is getting.