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The Filmmaker
Scott Teems is a writer/director born and raised in Lilburn, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.
His screenplay for That Evening Sun previously won the Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award at the IFP Market, and the film marks his feature directorial debut.
Previous writing and directing credits include A Death in the Woods, which won the Kathryn Tucker Windham Storytelling Award at the Sidewalk Moving Pictures Festival, as well as several short films that have screened at film festivals across North America. Scott is also a successful commercial director, helming popular viral video campaigns for corporations such as IBM, Cisco, KB Home, and the Walt Disney Company. Scott presently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and children.
Director’s Statement I believe the pursuit of truth must be my ultimate goal as a filmmaker, if I'm to have any chance to use cinema for its deepest and most profound purposes. Purposes of transcendence and connection, abstraction and release. Or even just to tell a simple, satisfying story in an hour and fifty minutes. But the truth can be a scary proposition, because it is illuminating. It is raw and unfiltered. It shows our scars. But it also shows our beauty, our grace, our unknown holiness. It is through this lens of truth that I try to look at everything, including my homeland, the American South. That Evening Sun is, proudly and without reservation, a film about the South. For better or for worse.
The South, and Southern characters in general, continue to be woefully misrepresented in much of American cinema. Accent is mistaken for character; dirty jeans for a dumb brain. If only things were so simple. But the road of complaint is a dead end. I can only continue my search for what is honest and true about this place where I’m from, this place that made me who I am. The South is a vibrant and valuable part of this country; one which deserves to be properly and thoroughly explored by its own sons and daughters.
Yet I hope that this is so much more than a film about the South. I hope it’s a film about men. About fathers and sons, husbands and wives. About grieving. About not grieving. About land and class. About right and wrong. And about how it’s rarely a simple task to tell the difference. And I hope it’s about a badass old man who looks death in the eye and says, ‘Go to Hell. I’ve got some living left to do.
Filmography
Looking Up Dresses (short) - Very Special Thanks - 2008 A Death in the Woods (short) - Director, Writer (screenplay), Editor - 2007 Le Chase (short) - Director, Editor - 2006 Root (short) - Director, Writer (story and screenplay) – 2004
