Slash Pile
Official selection, Ridgeline Film Festival 2024. Best feature, Ninth Street Film Festival 2025.
The programmer's note
Rourke plants trees for a living between films, and the labour in this is not researched, it is remembered. Ninety-seven minutes, and the truck turns up at minute thirty-one. Watch what the film does with the count. Every planter calls their number at the end of the day, and the numbers tell you the plot before the dialogue does. This is quiet the way a room is quiet before somebody says something. It is not a horror film. It is the closest thing in the catalogue to one.
The film
Reforestation contracts pay by the tree. A crew of nine works a burned unit above the John Day River, sleeping in a camp with a water tank and a generator and putting eight hundred seedlings a day each into ground that went up two summers ago. Val Ostrander has been on crews for six seasons and is running this one because the last foreman quit in June. On the fourth day a planter finds a truck under a slash pile at the top of the unit, plates gone, interior cleared out. The contractor's position is that the unit gets finished and then the sheriff gets called. The crew's position depends on the crew member. Rourke shoots the work in punishing detail, the bag, the hoedad, the count, and lets the discovery sit unresolved in the middle of all that labour for most of the film. Slash Pile is a thriller with almost no violence in it, in which nine people gradually establish what each of them will do for a day's pay.
