Description

Winner of the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary at the Denver Film Fest, Grand Jury-Prize Winner for Best Documentary at the Florida Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Hollywood Film Festival, and Best International Documentary at DocNZ.

One of the strangest, most deadpan, most intricately constructed docs at this year's festival…A satiric study of rural American values wrapped in an attempted murder mystery. Funny and chilling, beautifully shot, cunningly edited, and eye-opening on every level --Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

A mystery, a comedy, a deft character study and, ultimately, a bracing critique of how development is contributing to the disappearance of the family farm. --Jurors for The Maysles Brothers Award, Denver FF, AJ Schnack (filmmaker), Brian Brooks (IndieWire) and David Wilson (True/False Film Festival).

A stranger-than-truth tale both amusing and appalling… --Dennis Harvey, Variety

A rural Rashomon. Amazing… mesmerizing… one of the best documentaries on closed off communities and human politics ever mounted. --Bill Gibron, DVD Talk

Relentlessly surprising. Hilarious. Plays like a rural film noir directed by Errol Morris . --Chris Gray, The Phoenix

Audience members' jaws may be agape all through this strange-but-true story. --Craig Lindsey, Raleigh News & Observer


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. It’s a place most tourists never see— as the locals say, the real
Maine.

This is where Josh Osborne was raised, on his family’s third-generation dairy
farm in Farmington, with his mother, father, and two sisters. Pulled out of
school in the sixth grade, Josh would get lost on the five-mile trip to town and
faced a life of hard labor. As an uncle says: Once your ass hits the tractor
seat, those days are just as long as a full-grown man's. 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.

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.

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Cast

Josh Osborne, Donna Enman, Andrew Robinson, Jeffrey Jackson

Festivals

Winner of the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary at the Denver Film Fest, Grand Jury-Prize Winner for Best Documentary at the Florida Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Hollywood Film Festival, and Best International Documentary at DocNZ.

Full Frame, Hot Springs, Denver, Hollywood, DocNZ, DocFest NY, Florida, Maine, Camden, WoodsHole

Production Credits & Notes

Produced by Michael Chandler & Sheila Canavan
Written & Directed by Michael Chandler
Music by Blake Leyh
A Moenkopi Group/Ingonish Films Production
USA Color 81 min.