‘Fur,’ Story of Bigfoot Abductee Albert Ostman to Star Frank Mosley

Actor-filmmaker Frank Mosley, star of Sundance Jury Prize winners “Upstream Color” and “The Procedure,” is set to play the lead in “Fur,” taking on the part of Albert Ostman, history’s first Bigfoot abductee – and reluctant romancer.

Directed by Austin-based Brad Abrahams, best known for cult doc-feature “Love and Saucers,” a Special Jury Prize at the 2017 Fantastic Fest, “Fur” will be presented at this week’s Frontières Market, which runs July 23-26 at Canada’s Fantasia Film Fest. 

“Fur” tells the “loosely true” tale of Albert Ostman, a melancholic logger who heads into the Canadian wilderness in 1924 to pan for gold and change his fortunes, Abrahams told Variety in the run-up to Frontières.  

Ostman’s escape into solitude is cut short when he’s violently abducted by a Sasquatch and taken to a cave it shares with its mate and their daughter. “As the days pass, Albert is pulled into a world of isolation, strange rituals, and forbidden intimacy – an ordeal that ends in bloodshed, and an act of creation,” the synopsis runs. 

“To play a Canadian logger in the 1920s would be appealing enough, but to compound it with an interspecies romance was to make an offer I couldn’t refuse,” said Mosley. 

He added: “When Brad and Matt brought this project to me, I was immediately taken by their avoidance of camp and their interest in nuance, in wanting to give this wild tale a very sincere, grounded sensibility. I couldn’t be more excited to portray Albert and to explore their visceral themes of desire, otherness, and belongingness within a no-holds-barred genre framework.” 

Billed as “fantastical romantic horror,” it is written by Joslyn Jensen, who co-penned SXSW title “Funny Bunny” and an episode of the Duplass Brothers-produced web-series “The Ride” which played the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.

“At its core, the film examines masculinity and sexuality under pressure, and the quiet horror of wanting something truly other. It explores how isolation distorts perception, and how captivity, dependency, and desire blur together when you have no one left and nowhere else to go,” Abrahams noted.

“I am especially interested in sex-positive narratives that subvert the status quo, so I was extremely excited by the idea of a cryptid horror story that devolves into interspecies domesticity,” Jensen added.  

The film is set up at Austin and Seattle-based Anomalous Pictures, which was recently founded by Abrahams and producer Matt Ralston, who produced “Love and Saucers.” “Fur” will be produced by Ralston and Mosley.

Mosley’s credits as an actor also take in “Color Obex,” at this year’s Sundance Next strand, Annecy 2022 winner “Quantum Cowboys” SXSW 2020 entry “Freeland,” Cameron Bruce Nelson’s debut feature “Some Beasts,” 2018 Champs-Elysée’s Film Festival winner “The Ghost Who Walks” and “Collective Unconscious,” a 2016 SXSW contender. 

Abrahams is also a writer and correspondent and occasional host for the celebrated QAA podcast, co-directing its mini-series “The Spectral Voyager” with Jake Rockatansky.

“Early on, I wrote down what kind of proof I would need, on a personal level, to accept the existence of Bigfoot. My answer was, essentially: ‘a body,’” said Jensen. “Since then, I’ve come to understand the true power of Sasquatch stories is not about proof, but more to do with the willingness to believe in something you may never get to see or experience first hand: a better world. A dead Bigfoot body is so much less important than the chance that a Bigfoot (or several) is living out there right now, minding its own business, pure, natural and free.”