Mark Borchardt

About Mark Borchardt

Mark Borchardt (born 1966) is an American independent filmmaker. He is best known as the subject of American Movie: The Making of Northwestern (1999), a film that documented two of the three and a half years he spent writing, shooting and editing his horror short, Coven (1997).

Borchardt was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother Monica is Swedish. He started making films at the age of fourteen with a super-8 camera that he bought from a garage sale for $40. After serving three years in the military, he continued his cinematic endeavors at the local university. In the mid-nineties, he wrote and produced Halloween radio dramas which were broadcast annually and won a fellowship from the Milwaukee Art Futures Board.

Filmmakers Chris Smith and Sarah Price began filming Borchardt while he was attempting to put together funding for his unfinished feature Northwestern; after the project collapsed, Borchardt decided to instead finish Coven, which he had started years earlier. After Coven was completed, Smith and Price compiled their footage into American Movie, which was picked up by Sony Classics and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.