St. Louis film and commercial editor Lucas Harger is headed for Hollywood — well, Austin, Texas, for now.
Harger, a partner and supervising editor at Outpost which is part of the St. Louis-based film production company Bruton Stroube, has not one but two sports documentaries, Clemente and Lions of Mesopotamia, playing at the 2024 South by Southwest film festival, which runs from Friday, March 8 to Saturday, March 16.
“I'm pumped!” he exclaims. “It feels good.”
Harger describes SXSW as a celebration of filmmaking, a celebration of the stories in a “microcosmic way.”
“This is definitely the first premiere festival that we've been to,” he says. “We've been to a couple other festivals like B- and C-level festivals. But in the States, it's really South by Southwest. It's really like the premiere film festival and we've never had a feature get into a festival of this caliber.”
Clemente tells the story of Roberto Clemente, the first high-profile Latino player in Major League Baseball. The documentary shows how he opened the door for generations of Latino baseball players but also highlights his fighting for social justice and racial equality, his commitment to society's marginalized and under-represented, as well as his death in a plane crash while seeking to help victims of the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake.
Lions of Mesopotamia tells the story of the Iraqi national soccer team’s journey to become Asian Cup champions in 2007 during the bloodiest days of their country’s civil war. SXSW says the film showcases the “untold story of war, football and redemption and when all hope is lost, love and humanity can prevail.”
Harger says both films were in post production with his company for about two and a half years. His work focuses on the “post house” services offered by Bruton Stroube, which involve bringing a film to its completion.
”We'll get pulled into the process at some level of production, whether it's 50 percent shot, 80 percent shot or whatever,” he says. “We'll get in there and start breaking down the story, breaking down the different elements that we have, and then we'll be able to speak to Production and be like, ‘It would be awesome if we could get this and this.’”
Though sports are just one of the genres of films that Harger works on, he says he can appreciate the deeper meaning behind the stories. He believes both films call the viewer in and asks them to be better. “I love watching films like that, and I love making them,” he says.
Harger believes the sports documentary genre is currently in its golden era due to the amount of amazing stories it tends to inspire.
“Sports just provide an immediate hook or there's always something at stake with athletes in athletics, whether it's a competition, bettering their lifestyle, bettering their life situation and circumstances,” he says. “There's just always something very interesting happening in the world of sports and storytelling.”
Harger describes both films as going way beyond sports arenas. Of Lions of Mesopotamia, he says, “It’s a very rich and deep story, really about Iraq from 2000 to 2007, and everything that was happening in that country as told by the Iraqi National Team. Then Clemente reaches outside the specific sports bio docs genre, and starts to hit tones in moments that are greater than the sum of its parts.”
At Bruton Stroube, Harger cuts broadcast and web commercials for nationally recognized clients such as Enterprise, Anheuser-Busch, Famous Footwear, Amazon, Microsoft and more. Harger and the Outpost team are also currently working on three other feature documentaries and a multi-hour episodic documentary series.
“There's just a lot of momentum around documentaries,” Harger says. “Obviously we’ll always do commercials because commercials are our passion and our pride and joy, but then we get the opportunity to tell these stories. We're getting more opportunities and bigger opportunities and being able to really start to hone this space as a destination for premiere documentary post production is really exciting.”
Harger’s love for documentaries and films started when he was a kid back in Michigan filming sponsorship wakeboard videos for his friends.
“That's kind of where I started to get into filmmaking, if that's what you want to call those — I would definitely not call them films — but that's where I got into the craft of it,” he explains.
From there he went to college, transferring a few times before graduating from his fourth and final college, Greenville University, where he received a degree in music business.
“I moved [to St. Louis] and just started freelancing and working with small businesses doing some graphic design and web development, some of this, some of that,” Harger says. “But I’ve always had an affinity and obviously an appreciation for not only filmmaking, but also the editing."
Shaping thousands of minutes of footage into a compelling story is Harger’s favorite part of the film-making process, and lucky for him, 10 years ago, he was hired at Bruton Stroube as an editor.
“Documentary has always been my passion,” Harger says. “The genre of documentary is really the editor's playground, the editor's medium. You just have your hands in so many aspects of the filmmaking. You can set the tone, the pace, the aesthetic, and a lot of times, doc editors are also given writing credit. There's just so many more aspects and the editor really sits at the hub of documentary projects. I just really liked that, I liked having more responsibility, I like having more input than a scripted editor does. I just liked the challenge of pulling a thread of a story and seeing what happens.”
Even so, commercials still hold a special place in his heart. “It's a much quicker cadence between those projects, you can actually get something completed in like a week or two versus three or four years,” he says. “You get an opportunity to collaborate with a lot more people, you get an opportunity to see your work get delivered and an opportunity to hone different aspects of your craft.”
While at Bruton Stroube, Hager has worked on more than 10 feature films. He won an Emmy for cutting The Road through Warroad, a nationally broadcasted documentary for NBCSN, and a Silver YDA award for his work on Sleep Well My Baby at the Cannes Film Festival.
“It's very exciting because it's the next step in getting [these films] onto a major platform and getting [them] in a wider distribution than you can by self releasing,” Harger says of festivals. He’s especially looking forward to being at South by Southwest. “It's also exciting because the work is being celebrated. It's going to be a good time to go out there with the team and see [them] on the big screen. It's one step closer to what we really want, which is as many people as possible watching these films as quickly as possible.”
For more information about Lucas Harger or Bruton Stroube’s Outpost, visit their website.
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