Mark Borchardt writes screenplays, picks up acting jobs and co-hosts a radio show on Riverwest Radio (104.1 FM). He’s a busy guy. But many people still know him from something he did long ago, Coven, his no-budget made-in-Milwaukee horror film that became the subject of American Movie (1999).
Borchardt is back with a new film, The Dundee Project. OK, new-ish. The 2017 documentary, shot at the UFO Daze event held each summer in Dundee, Wisconsin, has traveled the festival circuit, including, as the director recalls, “opening night at the Wisconsin Film Festival.” Recently, The Dundee Project was released on DVD and made available on digital download by the Milwaukee-rooted team behind the Found Footage Festival.
Borchardt had brought his camera with him to UFO Daze for several years, taking picture of flickering lights the attendees claim as flying saucers and keeping microphone and mike open. “I ws more interested in avoiding small talk” while at the event, he says, “so every time I went up, I filmed in order to earn a sense of aesthetic accomplishment. I don’t remember when I realized it could be a film. Maybe from the start.”
The local characters and visiting UFO buffs caught on camera “made their cinematic worth immediately apparent,” Borchardt adds. “They were camera-worthy at the green light.”
Did Borchardt come away convinced or skeptical of the claims made at UFO Daze? “A frisbee could technically be a UFO until it’s identified,” he says. “As for belief, it’s a non-question. Scientifically, there are countless amounts of varied lifeforms throughout the universe.”
Probably so, but why on Earth would they visit Dundee? If the answer is out there, it’s not found in The Dundee Project.
