Mickey Reece

Mickey Reece is a writer/director from Oklahoma City, OK. He has directed over 25 feature films in just over a decade with each subsequent work pushing the boundaries of his own established form and unique brand of art-house cinema. Reece grew up in the small town of Newcastle, OK and began making amateur movies with an 8mm camcorder when he was a teenager. After amassing a remarkable amount of short films made with his friends and family over the course of five years, adult Reece became more interested in his other passion as a touring musician, putting the camera aside. Many years later Reece would get the bug again. He made his first feature length film Le Corndog Du Desespoir on a Canon XL1 mini DV camera and edited the footage on iMovie with a power Mac G5. As the lead actor of his early features, Reece soon realized that the shot looked better when he was behind the camera so he would limit his participation as an actor to minor roles or not appear at all. After completing a project every couple of months, Reece and his friends would premiere their feature films three times a year at a local music venue in Norman, OK called Opolis. Two years and six films later, the community and fan base surrounding these homegrown movies would prove to be too large for Opolis to house any longer. Punch Cowboy (2011) was the first of Reece's films to premiere at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City. The flexible theater space seated 200 people and became the new home for these unique communal events for the next five years. Production would eventually slow down to just two films a year but the cinematic quality with each project became more refined. After having to reschedule the premiere for Tarsus (2013) in Oklahoma City twice due to bad weather, Reece and producer/star Rebecca Cox felt that the movie wasn't going to get a fair shake in Oklahoma City. It was decided to enter some film festivals out of state. Tarsus was accepted to a modest handful of American festivals, winning awards for both Reece as director and Rebecca Cox as lead actor. It eventually got it's premiere in Los Angeles at the South Park Center Theater as a part of New Filmmakers Los Angeles Film Festival. Reece continued to average two films a year, premiering them at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, but wouldn't enter a movie into another festival for four years. 2017 saw the premiere of Mickey Reece's Alien, a rumination on spirituality, space and divine existentialism inspired by the later years of Elvis and Priscilla Presley's tumultuous marriage. The film premiered at Oklahoma City's DeadCenter Film Festival and, in time, ended up in the hands of TIFF's Midnight Madness curator Peter Kuplowsky. Enthusiastic about the discovery of this oddity, Kuplowsky got in touch and offered his assistance in navigating Reece's career as a filmmaker. In 2018 Reece's stylized and surreal take on the horror genre Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart became the first of Reece's films to play at an international film festival. Fantastic Fest in Austin, a haven for micro-budget productions and bizarre genre exercises that attracts open-minded and adventurous viewers, advertised Reece as an outsider artist who had been directing no budget feature films in obscurity for over a decade, with 'Strike' screening at Alamo Drafthouse as the first time one of them had ever been shown outside of Oklahoma City. A loose re-imagining of Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata, 'Strike' was bewildering to festival-goers and film critics alike, with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas writing "Traditional film criticism leaves one thoroughly ill-equipped to assess the success of a film so unique by any orthodox standards of assessment..." and Lorry Kitka adding in her review "It's not that often I am surprised by the strangeness of a film." The 'Strike' premiere caught the interest of LA based production company Divide/Conquer who would produce Reece's next two projects, Climate of the Hunter (2019) and Agnes (2021), solidifying a spiritual trilogy of stylized horror inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman. Climate of the Hunter was well received by festival-goers and critics and became the first Reece film to be elevated to the status of "limited theatrical release." After the success of Climate of the Hunter, a collection of Reece's earlier works including T-Rex (2014), Suedehead (2015), Mickey Reece's Alien (2017), Strike, Dear Mistress, And Cure His Heart (2018) and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune (2019) were made available to the public by Alamo Drafthouse's own streaming service Alamo On Demand in 2020. Belle Isle (2020), a short documentary chronicling Reece's story and featuring never before seen clips of the amateur movies Reece grew up making is also included on the streaming service. In 2022, Reece premiered Country Gold, a fantastical country music comedy and spiritual sequel to Mickey Reece's Alien (2017), at Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival.