What’s Buried Beneath the Pines just secured another win—this time as a Quarterfinalist in the 2025 Nashville Film Festival Screenwriting Competition.
It’s a big deal. Not because it’s the final round (it’s not—it’s the first). But because NFF doesn’t hand out these nods lightly. They’re one of the longest-running and most respected regional festivals in the country. They know story. They know craft. And this means WBBTP is doing something right.
This pilot is a slow, deliberate burn. No flashy action sequences. No slick heroes. Just deeply flawed people wrestling with old ghosts and worse memories. Gray Harris returns home to bury his estranged father—only to discover the real rot wasn’t in the coffin, it was in the ground the whole time.
It’s Southern Gothic, sure. But not the kind you can predict. The town’s too quiet. The smiles don’t reach the eyes. The sins are generational, passed down like silverware and buried like bones beneath pine roots. It’s fiction, but not by much.
What’s Buried Beneath the Pines came out of years of chewing on one question: what happens when the version of your family you were raised on turns out to be a lie? When the myth cracks, and the truth underneath is uglier—and more important—than anyone wanted to admit?
That’s where this story lives. Not in twists. In tension. Not in shock. In silence. I wanted it to feel like driving home from a funeral at dusk with the windows down, and realizing halfway through the trip that the road behind you doesn’t look familiar anymore.
The recognition from NFF helps affirm that the gamble worked. I didn’t write this script for a mass-market network audience. I wrote it for people who know what it means to sit at a dinner table full of secrets. For the folks who know that small towns don’t bury their sins—they plant them.
This is part of a larger vision. WBBTP is the pilot that opens the door to Revenance, an anthology series about buried sins and reckoning across the South. Each season a new town. A new family. A new ghost clawing its way to the surface. But it starts here. With Gray. With his father. With this damn land.
It’s been encouraging to see this script gaining traction—not just in Nashville, but across multiple competitions. Between the Script Pipeline quarterfinal placement, the Top 50 spot in Roadmap’s JumpStart Competition, and breaking into the Top 10% of all projects on Coverfly, WBBTP is building the kind of momentum you can’t manufacture. It’s not hype. It’s the work. Quietly getting louder.
I’ve submitted this project to a few other places still pending, but what matters most is that it’s finding its people—readers and execs who are connecting with the tone, the voice, the unease beneath every line.
Quarterfinals might be just the beginning, but they matter. Every nod like this is proof that stories with grit, quiet tension, and emotional weight still have a place. Even in a sea of flashy loglines and high-concept spectacles, there’s room for something slower, sharper, stranger.
So yeah, I’ll take this placement with pride. It doesn’t just mean the story’s working—it means it’s being heard. And if there’s one thing this script is about, it’s that some truths won’t stay buried.
Thanks to the Nashville Film Festival for recognizing the story. And thanks to everyone who’s been in my corner while this thing takes root. Let’s keep pushing.
Here’s to the next round. Let’s see if this one keeps rising.