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Huck & Jim

An unhoused Missouri teenager and an undocumented Mauritanian migrant drift down the Mississippi River together on a makeshift raft in pursuit of freedom in this contemporary retelling of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

  • Frank Tovar
    Director
    the black watch: for every hair that's hurt I'll stop a heart
  • Frank Tovar
    Writer
    A last golden flash across the sky
  • Oscar A. Rosas
    Producer
    Argonauta
  • Brody Behr
    Key Cast
    "Huck"
    Secrets in Suburbia
  • Will Wamba
    Key Cast
    "Jim"
    Abduction
  • Lucy Zukaitis
    Key Cast
    "Miss Watson"
    Nutcrackers
  • Stephen Wester
    Director of Photography
    Vic Mensa: There's Alot Going On
  • Ania Bista
    Production Designer
    Fargo, The Trial of the Chicago 7
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    15 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 17, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States, United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1.85:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Frank Tovar

I have been making movies since I got my first video camera at age 13. Naturally, the stars of my first movies were my friends and my immediate family in Chicago, as well as my extended Cuban family in Miami, Florida and Santa Clara, Cuba.

I first fell in love with cinema at four years old when I had to be dragged out of the Milwaukee Public Museum's "nickelodeon" exhibit showing Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" on a loop. I couldn't get enough, and on the way to the car, I mastered Chaplin's distinctive walk.

I studied film at Santa Monica College, and English literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now I teach filmmaking to middle school kids in the Movie Club I founded at the Chicago public school where I work as a paraprofessional.

ATTN: Festivals with age requirements — director Frank Tovar’s age is 35.

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Director Statement

The initial idea for “Huck & Jim,” a contemporary retelling of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," started to develop in early 2017 when I re-read Twain's classic novel.

As I was reading Huck’s account of his and Jim’s treacherous journey for freedom, I was also reading news reports about the present-day treacherous journeys for freedom being made by migrants and undocumented workers fearing deportation and other attacks in the US.

During the early part of 2017, there was a spike in the number of migrants and undocumented workers escaping the US by crossing the border "illegally" into Canada in order to claim asylum, with the largest numbers coming from African countries, from Ghana and other west African countries, and from Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa in the east.

Terrified of being deported to countries plagued by war and extreme poverty, many migrants made the dangerous trek by foot across the Canadian border in freezing temperatures, some of them losing fingers and toes to frostbite.

Tragically, a woman from Ghana, Mavis Otuteye, died of hypothermia less than a mile from the Canadian border in Minnesota.

Now in 2025, mass deportations are being unleashed against the population by the new administration in the US. In cities like Cincinnati and Springfield, Ohio, immigrant populations originating from countries including Mauritania and Haiti are demonized with outrageous lies spread by the far right and promoted by the new administration.

And in December 2024, a lawmaker in Missouri, the state of Huck and Jim, proposed a bounty system for reporting and capturing migrants and undocumented workers, recalling the horrific bounty system that plagued Jim in Twain's novel.

"Huck & Jim" was made in a spirit of defiance against these appalling attacks, and against those who would seek to divide the modern-day Hucks and Jims.

In this context, Twain's immortal depiction of the comradeship between Huck and Jim takes on an increasingly subversive and urgently burning significance.

As the late Twain scholar Justin Kaplan pointed out, “Anyone who responds to Huckleberry Finn’s own conflicts of conscience at heart will never again be able to accept as moral absolutes the conventional wisdom of a particular time and place.”