Basic Information

Logline and Synopsis

LOGLINE
A Southern Gothic thriller that follows a homeless woman and a young, upper-middle class girl as their lives tragically intertwine.

SYNOPSIS
ROADKILL takes place over one day in the lives of 17 year old Hannah, an overachiever with dreams of leaving her small Southern town, and Rhonda, a homeless woman fighting for survival. When Hannah gets accepted to her dream college in California, she goes out partying with her boyfriend Dillon. Meanwhile, Rhonda spends the evening scavenging for food, growing increasingly desperate. Neither woman knows that fate will soon tie them together...

About the Director

Justin T. Malone is a rising Southern filmmaker with an eye for the grotesque, profane, and darkly humorous. Working in the Southern Gothic literary tradition, Justin's films typically focus on working class rural Southerners like the people he grew up around in West Tennessee.

ROADKILL, an expressionistic crime thriller, is Justin's 6th short film. It explores the multiplicity of experiences between the oppressed and the privileged in contemporary Southern society.

Director's Statement

I grew up in rural Tennessee, in a place where lives are lived hard and short. Through good luck and hard work on my parents’ part, we climbed the social and financial ladder and when I was 14 we moved to an affluent town outside Nashville, a place where teenagers drive luxury cars and dream of escaping from their “oppressive” hometowns.

I don’t care to waste time condemning children who didn’t know better and are probably mostly decent adults now, but I did grow to see something ironic in the way that the people who often have the most derision for “The South” (whatever that means) are the ones who benefit the most from its various inequities—social, racial, and economic.

ROADKILL is a film that seeks to investigate that irony and challenge its viewers to think about the way the middle and upper classes in America often fail and unintentionally victimize the less fortunate.