Let’s meet at the Mount Shasta Cinemas for one last movie before they close…a real local mystery!
The Hole Story, directed by Mount Shasta native Elijah Sullivan, will screen at Mt. Shasta Cinemas beginning Thursday, August 7, running through Wednesday, August 13. It marks the film’s hometown theatrical debut after a festival run that took it to Slamdance, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, SF DocFest, and several others — and after a segment adapted from the film aired on This American Life.
The subject is exactly what the title suggests. In the summer of 2009, a sixty-foot hole was discovered on the slopes of Mount Shasta, on land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Timber workers going through the national forest found the deeply excavated pit, and nobody could explain who had dug it, or why. The small community at the mountain’s base immediately began to speculate: Was it simply an illegal gold mine? A conspiracy theorist searching for a lost civilization? Something more sinister?
Sullivan, who grew up in Mount Shasta and works at the town’s independent video store, spent the better part of a decade chasing the answer. The investigation that resulted became The Hole Story — part detective film, part portrait of a community, and part meditation on why people reach for myth when facts run out. The conflicting theories that emerge ultimately form a portrait of a community in spiritual decline, and a cautionary tale about the nature of storytelling itself.