Grass Lake Film

My name is Wilson Kurschner and I am a 20 year old award-winning filmmaker. I grew up here in Minneapolis, and so needless to say this project is very personal to me and is largely based off of my own experiences of being a kid growing up around this kind of environment (minus the serial killer). 
I made my first feature film when I was 15 and have been going steadily ever since!


For me, making this film is about three or four things: 


1. Posterity: When I go for walks around this town I realize that it is slowly but steadily changing. Here a house is torn down, there a piece of nature is now a triplex. When I was very little, I remember there being kids everywhere all the time during the summer. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but now I have the feeling that most of them have better things to do on their phones or indoors. Instead of looking for the boogeyman with their friends they’re spending hours on tiktok. They drink earlier. There aren’t really many mysteries to them that aren’t a google search away. They are becoming further disengaged from the physical world and further away from the way of life I grew up with. My hope is to show the only world I really understand, and that’s the one without the smartphones.

2. It's about making something fun to watch. That doesn’t mean it has no depth to it -actually it’s quite the opposite- but it means that after the year we’ve all been through, don’t you think we deserve a movie that isn’t so dreadfully serious?

3. It’s about showcasing the feeling of being a kid in these neighborhoods. I’ve snuck out of the house at night. I’ve ran around looking for monsters in the creek. I’ve been enchanted by the mystery of the opposite sex. I’ve been the kid no one has invited to the sleep over. I think to a large extent these are universal experiences, but the difference in Grass Lake is that you get the feeling of the area, the geography. The warm summer breeze, the shadows of the leaves on the pavement, the quiet of the city at night and the ever present, exciting eeriness of the unknown that is only really ever present to us when we’re young.

4. It’s about showing the power movies have over us to inspire people (particularly young people) to get out of the house and have a real experience gosh darn it!


I want to make Grass Lake because it’s a film nobody has seen before. It’s a movie no one has ever made, a story that somehow is familiar and universal, and yet has managed to slip through the cracks of the decades. 


To fund this film is to fund a representation of a time and place which might not exist forever, so it’s critical to make it while we still can. 


If you contribute to this film you are contributing to an idea, an idea which says that maybe sometimes to move forwards in life we have to do things that scare us, that being together is often better than being alone, and above all else, that it is good to be kind in this bizarre, wild world.


-Wilson Kurschner, director of Grass Lake