Christopher Munch

More than a decade later, Munch returned to wilderness filmmaking with Letters from the Big Man (2011), a New York Times Critics' Pick that featured a lauded central performance by Lily Rabe. Shot in remote parts of southern Oregon, and set against the backdrop of a controversial fire salvage, it received wide attention for its groundbreaking, realistic take on the mythology of sasquatch-bigfoot.

An impossible dream was the overarching theme of Munch's second feature, the sprawling period drama Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996), based on a true story Munch had read as a child of a young trolley mechanic who tries to save a doomed short-line railroad to Yosemite National Park. Its award-winning cinematography -- by Munch's frequent collaborator, Rob Sweeney -- was inspired by the early landscape photography of Carelton Watkins, while the film's title was suggested by the landmark poem of Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol.

Christopher Munch is an American writer-director-producer. Self-taught in filmmaking and a native of Southern California (by way of Boston), he began making films as a youngster. He is the son of astrophysicist Guido Münch and writer Louise Fernandez. He cites such American independents as Robert M. Young and Victor Nunez, along with the drama presented by Lindsay Law as part of the PBS series "American Playhouse," as inspirations in the early '80s, and later John Cassavetes and Gregg Araki, each of whom embodied a type of personal storytelling and production model to which Munch was drawn. Five of Munch's feature films played at Sundance, and his first, The Hours and Times (1991), a speculative biopic of Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, won a special jury prize there. A micro-budget "kitchen-table" production that was shot in Spain, The Hours and Times went on to wide critical acclaim in the U. S. and England.

The July 10, 1985, edition of Variety announced the movie "Remembrances from The Garden of Laura", aka "Laura's Garden", began filming July 5, 1985, in Los Angeles. Director was Christopher Munch, cast Lynn-Holly Johnson and Scott Valentine. No evidence the film was ever released.