Sept. 29, 2022

This paid piece is sponsored by Pendar Properties.

Just when Dalton Coffey had made a big career decision, it was hard to tell whether the universe agreed.

The longtime commercial producer was going all in on his passion – filmmaking.

“I sold off all my gear in February 2020, and in March the entire world shut down,” said Coffey, an Arkansas native who now lives in Sioux Falls. “I couldn’t have given that stuff away if I’d waited.”

But trying to make a feature film during a pandemic wasn’t the easiest thing either.

Coffey’s plan had been to film in Arkansas, “and because of the pandemic, we postponed it again and again. We thought maybe last fall we could do it, and then COVID took off again in Arkansas.”

But Coffey had a film to make and decided “it was sort of a sign. Maybe we needed to stay here and try something here. There’s talent here but not much of a film infrastructure.”

His Sioux Falls connection began when he moved here in high school after living everywhere from Texas to Colorado. While his parents moved back to Arkansas, he stayed here.

“And it literally has taken me 20 years to feel comfortable enough to tell a South Dakota story,” he said.

Coffey, who founded Bomber Productions with his wife, Abbie, has been shooting films for more than a decade. His full-length feature “Poor Mama’s Boy” was filmed in rural Arkansas in 2015 and tells the story of a neglected 17-year-old who is suspected in the disappearance of a young girl. It becomes a tale of how far a young man is willing to go for his family.

Now, Coffey is working on “Fall is a Good Time to Die,” a film set in Burke, the county seat of Gregory County in south-central South Dakota. It’s a full-length feature film that follows a young ranch hand as he sets out to seek revenge on a man who molested his sister.

“The entire film is essentially a big hunting metaphor,” Coffey said. “We really wanted to embrace the land and not just the Badlands, which every film project that comes to our state seems to highlight. We want to show ranches and farms, and most of it is going to be shot near Burke.”

Why Burke? It’s Abbie Coffey’s hometown.

“So we know people there,” she said. “In 2012, we shot a short film on Bill and Renee Sutton’s ranch, so we know the land well, and they’re willing to allow us to film again. In Dalton’s mind, as he was writing the story, in his head that’s the land he was seeing.”

Abbie Coffey, a former teacher who spent 17 years with the Sioux Falls School District, now serves as director of operations at Pendar Properties, whose portfolio includes The Carpenter Building, Cherapa Place and Railyard Flats. In fact, her husband wrote much of the film while working from the third-floor residents’ lounge at Railyard Flats, where the couple lives.

“I love working at Pendar. It’s a great place, and we’re doing great things there, and they’re being very gracious to let me work away from the office when we film for much of October,” Abbie Coffey said. “I produce and do a lot of the business side. We have some Screen Actors Guild actors coming in, so I’ll fill out the paperwork for that, schedule stays and food, travel, all of that.”

While much of the detail behind the production, including the cast, will stay mostly under wraps until further into production, the lead role is being played by local actor Joe Hiatt.

“He’s a phenomenal talent,” Coffey said. “Most of the story was developed sitting at this table at Railyard Flats with Joe.”

Of the 23 speaking roles, many are local talent, while some actors are coming from out of state.

“We’re trying to make this a South Dakota story, and we want to be as real as we can,” Coffey said.

The hope is that by spring the film will be done and in the hands of a sales agent and publicist whose job it is to sell it to a distributor or get it into film festivals.

“Because Dalton and I do so much, we can take a budget that’s generally fairly large and shrink it because we don’t take any money up front,” Abbie Coffey said. “We are meeting with investors now to sell some shares in the film, and while it’s a high-risk investment, we try to mitigate it as much as possible. But you’re still trying to sell art without a picture being here.”

Fundraising will continue through post-production.

To learn more, email [email protected] or [email protected].

“There’s really no film industry here, and we’d like to try and change that,” Coffey said. “We realized maybe we have an opportunity.”