Austin Bunn is a writer, screenwriter, and professor. He is the author of The Brink: stories, published by Harper Perennial, and wrote the script for Kill Your Darlings (Sony Pictures Classics) with the film’s director John Krokidas, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and won the International Days Prize at the Venice Film Festival. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Zoetrope, The Village Voice, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere. He has written feature screenplays for Fox 2000, Lionsgate, Participant Media, Page1, and served as a mentor at the Screenwriters’ Colony (Nantucket) and Outfest Screenwriting Lab. His award-winning short films have screened nationally and internationally at Frameline (SF), OutFest (LA), InsideOut (Toronto), Provincetown International Film Festival (MA), Sidewalk Film Festival (AL), Milwaukee Film Festival (WI), MEZIPATRA (Czechoslovakia), USN Expo (Italy), and elsewhere. He is a New York State Council on the Arts/NY State Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellow in Screenwriting 2022-23. He teaches at Cornell University.

“There are thirty-some LGBT campgrounds in America – a phenomenon that started in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic as refuges for urban gay men and as meeting places for rural (often closeted) men from conservative areas. It allows for connection outside of bars and urban life. In the summer of 2022, I decided to make a documentary about one of the oldest gay campgrounds, Hillside, located in the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania, exploring how campgrounds help heal an estrangement between gay men and nature. After weeks of interviewing, I ran into some unexpected obstacles – foremost, that some men risked exposure in speaking to me and many prized their privacy (Hillside has a long-standing “no cameras” policy). So, in an effort to capture the transformational experiences of many of them described, I pivoted and built a composite character from the stories I heard and filmed a narrative that unfolds in the real place, on an actual weekend, blended with interview material. The film features six “perms” (resident campers and non-actors) and two professional actors, along with dozens of Hillside campers as extras.”

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