Our Story

Dead Deer High was created by the husband and wife team, Joshua Roark and Jo Rochelle, in collaboration with the Lucky Fools production company. Joshua and Jo met as middle school teachers through Teach for America and have been making films for and about young people ever since.

Director Statement: My husband and I met as middle school teachers. While we were dating, we'd often relax after a long day in the classroom by watching films together. Two films that had a profound effect on us during that stressful and rewarding time in our lives were the spoken-word documentary, Louder than a Bomb, and Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12. We saw ourselves represented in the students and the teachers, the teens and the adults.

As fans of poetry and teacher movies, we wondered what a modern-day Dead Poet's Society would look like. Beyond creating assignments and lesson plans, lockdown drills are now a part of a teacher's routine, and every time we did one, I felt wholly unprepared for the worst case scenario.

In the classroom, all of your strengths and weaknesses bubble up to the surface, plain for everyone to see. My students were never afraid to poke fun at me or blurt out annoyingly accurate observations. I didn't have it all together and I aimed to portray our main character, Jack, the same way. He teaches with passion and earnestly cares about his students, but he's also held back by his own trauma, his own fears. Early on in pre-production, I decided that the camera wouldn't enter his classroom until Jack was able to do so himself.

As someone who has been in choirs my whole life, I'm drawn to the lyricism and cadence of spoken word poetry. With Dead Deer High, I leaned into choir music, blending poetry with singing, and playing with rhythm in the edit.

Dead Deer High is a love letter to teachers, students, and poets. This is the kind of movie I would've loved to watch and unwind with after a strenuous day of teaching.

—Jo Rochelle