East Lansing Film Festival opens with documentary on life in the Alaska wilderness

Ryan Walsh had the sort of childhood you might find in travel brochures or early Hemingway tales.

Just beyond his backyard was sprawling Michigan expanse. “It was all state-owned,” he recalled. “I would go out and just explore …. I built a tree stand so I could watch the animals.”

What he didn’t realize was that an outdoor life can be a career move. Now his intriguing documentary, “The Stan Project,” will open the East Lansing Film Festival on Thursday.

The film follows Stan Zuray, who uses Alaska’s wilderness to provide food, heat and water.

“It’s what keeps me interested,” Zuray says in the film. “I’m never bored.”

Hearing about that, people might envision a scowling mountain man, rough and gruff. “He’s the opposite of that,” Walsh said. “He’s just so gentle and kind.”

In his early 70s, Zuray is a father of four and a grandfather, with a knee brace on one side and a full leg brace on the other. And he has no intention of slowing down.

Walsh, 39, met him a decade ago, fairly early in his career. Walsh had gone briefly to a Massachusetts college on a soccer scholarship, but then retreated home (Commerce Township in Oakland County) and majored in media at Central Michigan University.

With a job interview set for a Monday in Los Angeles, he packed up his car on a Saturday and moved West. Walsh has worked quite steadily ever since, as a cameraman, director of photography and producer; that included three years on “Dirty Jobs” and two on “Yukon Men."

The latter assigned him as the one-man crew, accompanying Zuray on a dogsled journey. “At night, he would tell these just wild stories about his life. I thought, ‘This is much more than a TV show.’”

Zuray had a complicated boyhood, he says in the film. His family was solid, but his neighborhood was brutal. Some of his best friends were killed and he saw one person bludgeoned to death.

“By the time I was 20, 21, I was a mess,” Zuray said.

His solution, a few years later: “A helicopter dropped him off, 40 miles from any town,” Walsh said.

Zuray spent 11 years in the Alaskan wilderness, showing inventiveness and a work ethic. He fished, trapped, found ways to bring heat and water to his little cabin. Then he moved the 40 miles to that “nearby” town.

“I’ve learned to enjoy being around people most of the time,” he said.

That’s where Walsh met him, in Tanana, a town of 235 (down from 308 in 2000). Zuray's home is at the outskirts, five miles from downtown, but he’s become part of the life. On Saturday nights, he runs the Tanana Teen Center, where kids can play pool or video games or just hang out.

More importantly, he met and married Kathleen Peters, an indigenous woman. They have four grown offspring — a son in Tanana and three daughters, two in Fairbanks and one in Boston.

This isn’t the super-sparse life Zuray once knew. One at-home scene is brightened by the lights of a Christmas tree.

“Kathleen likes to do that,” Walsh said; she tries to brighten the long winter darkness.

Mostly, however, this is a film about a man alone in nature. We see Zuray’s original cabin and his fishing camp. We see him trapping, fishing and chopping; we also see him drill through ice for water.

Walsh worked on the film for five years, while continuing other jobs (currently “Life Below Zero”). It was a busy life. “My wife (actress/writer Kari Pickering) had two kids while I was working on it,” he said.

About 300 people, many of them Zuray fans, contributed to crowdfunding. The budget was modest ($45,000-$50,000), if you don’t count Walsh’s time.

“A while back, we thought we were done,” he said. “But we looked around and decided to do another winter.” That portion ended up adding 15 minutes, almost one-quarter of the film.

Then, finally, it was finished. Far from the wilderness, “Stan Project” gets its world-premiere moment.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: East Lansing Film Festival opens with The Stan Project from Ryan Walsh