In the woods of North Carolina circa 1920, a mysterious traveller, the Photographer (Wentworth Miller), rides into a small town advertising his services as a photorapher of the dead.

The Photographer immortalizes the recently deceased wife of a local bootlegger, named Miller (Dermot Mulroney), who grows suspicious of the traveller's macabre demeanor when he sees him talking alone with his daughters Sarah (10) and Sadie (13). Fears of his twisted motives are realized when, just after Miller is arrested by roaming federal agents for bootlegging, Miller's daughter Sadie disappears.

Miller escapes the feds, but has to go undercover to find his daughter, turning to his local bootlegger community for help and to Hannah (Melissa Leo), a sharp-eyed herbalist and outcast. Together they fight with the prejudices and petty politics of the local sheriff¹s office, a snake handling preacher, and heavy-handed feds to free Sadie from The Photographer¹s dark obsessions.

The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest mountains in the
world. The Cherokee, who've lived here for eleven thousand years, calls them Sah-ka-naga (The Blue Hills of God). The French Broad River, which cuts through the Southern Highlands, is thought to be the third oldest river on the planet. Night comes early to these valleys and hollers, which shut out the sun and leave the earth cold and rich and black. There are mysteries here, old legends, old secrets which will never be told.

The Mourning Portrait hopes to capture some of that mystery, some of that dark and ancient grandeur. Built around the practice of early 20th Century post-mortem photography, the movie tells the tale of a family struggling to stay together under extraordinary circumstances: A wife and mother has passed; a father struggles with his own private grief; a drifter comes into town and suddenly a young girl goes missing.

The Mourning Portrait is patterned after those eerie post-mortem images themselves: Elegant, stately, restrained and very disturbing. Crafted with a nod not only towards old wives' tales but the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm and beyond, the story is both smart and visceral, like a fairy tale. Magical, dark, compelling and scary - that's our territory.

The colors of the Appalachian landscape are likewise restrained, the silvers and blacks of the bare trees and the cold skies, the dull browns of the dead leaves, the bright yellows of the fires and lamplight. Emotionally, these people are hard and silent; life is a struggle, a brief respite before Heaven or Hell. A vengeful God haunts these hills, as does the devil corn liquor. Poverty and isolation are resisted with a quiet nobility that urban folk will never understand; music, storytelling and bright laughter drift up into the night like the souls of these people themselves - resilient, hard-fought and hard-won.

A story for the ages, The Mourning Portrait is in the end interested in people, in the cracks and crevices of the human heart. It's a bit of a contradiction: We hope to find the grandeur in the gloom, a beating human heart swallowed in grief, adventure and dreamy passion in horror and suspense. Moments of tenderness are followed by unimaginable torment; disturbing visions are eclipsed by love and newfound maturity. These are the elements with which our movie, The Mourning Portrait, will come alive.
--Paul Schattel