Arts & Entertainment

Comments (3) Best Local Film - 2009

The Messenger, 360 Days of Bolivar

Moviemaker Shawn Welling stumbled upon a fascinating group of "swamp men" during a bike ride on Bolivar Peninsula. Hunting for a public restroom, he stopped into Norbert's Bait Camp & Bar. (It was like stepping into the bar scene in Star Wars, he would later say.) Inside Norbert's, Welling met a group of men with varied pasts, some shadier than others, each more eccentric than the next (Back-up Bert, for example, drives all over the peninsula in reverse because it's the only gear that still works on his pickup). The next time he visited Norbert's, Welling brought a film crew with him and started the documentary about the bar's regular customers, The Messenger, 360 Days of Bolivar. He would save these lost, discarded men, Welling thought. He didn't know that the men were thinking the same thing about him. (Welling completed only 360 days of filming; the project was interrupted by a little storm called Hurricane Ike.)

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