Nathan Zellner

Working in conjunction with director brother David, writer, producer and actor Nathan Zellner was responsible for some of the most distinctive indie films to come out of America since the late '90s. Born in Austin, TX, Zellner developed a love of cinema from a young age and began making home movies with his older sibling in his teens but initially pursued a career in engineering, graduating from Texas A&M University with a degree in the subject before landing a job in the telecommunications industry. However, the lure of the movies proved too hard to resist and after founding the Zellner Bros. production company with David, the pair announced their arrival as offbeat filmmakers with "Plastic Utopia" (1997), a surreal and ultra low-budget comedy about an unpopular mime artist's bid to lead a life of reckless abandon. Setting the formula for their similarly idiosyncratic future work, David served as director on the project with Nathan taking on the roles of writer and producer, while both also made cameos. Nathan added to his acting resume with minor parts in teen horror "Dead Man's Curve" (1998) and post-apocalyptic comedy "Radio Free Steve" (2000) before reuniting with his brother on "Frontier" (2000), another highly quirky affair which sees two police officers embarking on a journey to civilize a fictional war-torn Eastern European country. Zellner then took the director's chair for the first time on short film "Flotsam/Jetsam" (2005), played a police escort in meta murder-mystery "The Cassidy Kids" (2006) and landed the first of several voiceover gigs on comic sci-fi web series "Red vs. Blue." Returning to his duties as a producer and writer, "Goliath" (2008) saw Zellner tell the story of a recently divorced man who becomes obsessed with finding his lost cat, while "Slacker 11" (2011) found him paying tribute to Richard Linklater's 1991 cult classic. The tale of a ten-year-old tearaway who discovers the voice of a woman in an abandoned well, "Kid Thing" (2012) further established the Zellner Bros. individualistic style, before the duo became unlikely leads as two agents sent to an alien planet in the midst of a civil war in sci-fi horror "Dignity" (2013). The brothers then became festival favorites two years later with "Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter" (2015), a darkly comic fable based on the urban legend surrounding the death of a Tokyo office worker who traveled to Minneapolis, reportedly to locate the missing money hidden by Steve Buscemi's character in the Coen Brothers hit "Fargo" (1996).