Jens Pulver - Driven film

A special screening of JENS PULVER | DRIVEN - A FILM BY GREGORY BAYNE will be held on Friday, December 17th at the Egyptian theatre in downtown Boise. Your wristband gets you admission into the the after party at Cazba featuring DJ Patrick Benolkin who made the Driven Motion Picture Soundtrack.

 

 

                                          THE FILM

Jens Pulver grew up in an environment that few could imagine, and that would cripple most spirits. At the age of seven, Jens had a shotgun shoved into his mouth by his abusive father, who had lined up the children and threatened to kill them all, starting with Jens. By the age of ten, Jens was fist-fighting the man on a regular basis, and losing daily.

From this brutal beginning, Jens Pulver spent a lifetime fighting to overcome the poverty of his circumstance, corralling the physical and spiritual demons of his childhood, and eventually unleashing them into the world of Mixed Martial Arts, where he rose to epic proportions.

In 2001, Jens Pulver became the first Lightweight World Champion under the now multi-billion dollar fight industry that is the UFC. Jens Pulver’s image is branded into video games, t-shirts, athletic gear, and the minds of millions of Mixed Martial Arts fans around the world.



Revered as a legend, yet constantly fielding demands to retire after four straight losses in the ring, Jens Pulver accepted a ‘do or die’ battle in the form of a World Extreme Cagefighting match on March 6, 2010. Jens Pulver | DRIVEN is an intimate feature documentary that follows his journey, and presents an in-depth look at the complexities of this three-time world champion as he trains for what could be the final comeback fight of his career.

Ultimately, Jens Pulver | DRIVEN is a film about the universal human struggle to transcend personal loss in the pursuit of greatness.

It is a story, like many of our personal stories right now, about the quest to provide a more solid future for self and family than our own meager inheritances would have allowed.

All of us share this fight, to some degree, but not all of us, like Jens Pulver, have it played out in front of millions on pay-per-view. 

JENS PULVER

There is nothing pretend about Jens Pulver. He is unvarnished, authentic, individualistic, raw, inspiring, maverick, emotional, non-conforming, unpredictable, at times a walking contradiction and yet above all, he is real. At 34, he has seen and experienced more than most will throughout a lifetime. From a very young age, Jens was forced to endure challenges and experiences that would cripple most spirits. Yet even through intolerable verbal and physical abuse, Jens had the incomparable love of his mother and a steadfastness about him that would carry him through lifes greatest obstacles. He learned there would be no free lunches or easy roads. If there were to be any successes to celebrate, it would be done through hard work, effort and suffering. From a brutal beginning to an Epic rise, Jens would be gifted with amazing mentors and trustworthy coaches. Monte Cox and Pat Miletich would sculpt this masterpiece, understanding that sweat would replace entitlements and pity would not exist.


                                    THE FILMMAKERS

GREGORY BAYNE (Producer, Director, DP and Editor)

 

Gregory Bayne is a filmmaker currently in post-production on his latest film, Jens Pulver | DRIVEN, a feature documentary about the legendary mixed martial arts fighter. Prior to launching his own work, Bayne served as a cinematographer, and editor on several award winning short, feature length and documentary films including b.Dreams, ibid, Out of the Blue, Purple State of Mind, and Trudell; having shown theatrically, at film festivals worldwide (including Sundance, Seattle International, Munich, ImagineNATIVE and SXSW) and broadcast nationally on PBS, ESPN and the Sundance Channel. Bayne is also writer, and speaker who has been featured at The Conversation, held on the campus of Columbia University in New York, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Filmmaker Magazine, discussing new trends in independent film production, and distribution. Bayne’s first feature film, Person of Interest, hailed as “this generation’s Taxi Driver”, is currently on a national preview screening tour, and set to release in early 2011.

 

J. REUBEN APPELMAN (Co-Producer, Writer)

 

J. Reuben Appelman is an award-winning writer in multiple genres, most recently penning the dramatic conspiracy thriller, Person of Interest, which he produced and starred in, a children’s adventure drama, The Five, and the documentary film, Jens Pulver l Driven, which he co-produces. Other film industry writing includes work on the feature documentary, Playground, about the child sex trade in America, Executive Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh. His poetry collection, Make Loneliness, was published by Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, and was an Editor’s Choice favorite for 2009 in the international arts quarterly, BOMB magazine. Appelman is a four-time grant recipient from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, in the genres of poetry, memoir, and screenwriting, most recently having been awarded a prestigious State of Idaho Writing Fellowship in Literature. In the last year, his work has been featured by National Public Radio’s Andrei Codrescu and American Public Media’s “The Story,” and has premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. His memoir, Oakland County Killers, about a serial killer’s attempted abduction of him as a boy, is also the basis for a current screenwriting project, DETROIT.