Mason Hill (left) and Will Blomker play soldiers mistaken for war heroes.
Wisconsin Film Festival audiences will experience the Madison area on the big screen when Medal of Victory premieres April 19 at the Barrymore Theatre.
The madcap satirical comedy follows two soldiers who go AWOL after accidentally shipping nuclear fusion triggers to Malawi. It’s the project of four UW alums who reunited to make the film, shooting in Madison, Darlington, Cottage Grove and Baraboo.
“The tone could be described as the Coen brothers meet the comedies of the ’80s,” says Will Blomker, a Madison native and one of the film’s producers and lead actors. “And there’s a certain element of political satire that was influenced by our love of The Onion.”
Small-town Wisconsin is skewered, too, as the protagonists are mistaken for war heroes and get dragged into the cutthroat politics of a mayoral race. Blomker says Baraboo’s picturesque square provided the perfect setting for those scenes and that the city’s officials were supportive. “They gave us a squad car and police uniforms, and they shut down streets. We filmed in local businesses and even in the police station.”
Joshua Moise, who wrote, directed and edited Medal of Victory, says the film took about four years “from blank page to finished product.” It is the Atlanta native’s first feature film, but it’s not his first entry into the Wisconsin Film Festival. In 2002, the year Moise graduated from the UW, he had a short documentary, Wisconsin Supermax, in the festival.
After its premiere at the Barrymore, Medal of Victory will be showing at Point Cinema for one week, beginning on April 22.
Although Moise and Blomker currently work and reside in New York, they agree the Wisconsin Film Festival is the perfect homecoming for a film that wouldn’t exist without the UW. “We’re super-excited,” says Moise. “We were very happy to get in and to bring the film home and share it with everybody."
