Viewing: September 18,2025
Watch Trailer
Director: Braden King
Cast: Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Lili Taylor, Cosmo Jarvis
Join us on Thursday, September 18th at 7:00 p.m. as we kick off our Appalachian Stories Film Series!
This event will include a pre-show presentation by author Carter Sickels
Admission is FREE – Tickets are required
About the film
Based on the critically-acclaimed novel by Carter Sickels, The Evening Hour tells the story of Cole Freeman, a nursing home worker who has made a side-hustle selling the excess prescription pills of his elderly patients to the local people in his rural West Virginia town. Cole’s motive is not profit, however: he sees himself as a more compassionate source of the addicting drugs than the local drug dealer who cares more about money than the lives he is destroying. It’s a delicate balancing act – Cole must make sure that he doesn’t overstep his bounds and draw the ire of his competition. This delicate balance starts to erode, though, when an old friend of Cole’s returns to town with the goal of getting set up in the local drug trade.
About the speaker
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in publications includingThe Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, and Guernica. Carter is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.
Carter will be discussing the film adaptation of his novel The Evening Hour. The film, directed by Braden King, was shot in Harlan, Kentucky, and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
Check out the rest of the films in the Appalachian Stories Film Series
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