VAGABOND HOME | westofcenterfilms.com

MAD MAX WITH A HEARTBEAT //

Set in the desolate remains of a forgotten battlefield, Murry Culpepper roams aimlessly, scavenging for food, water, or anything he can sell to survive. He has no purpose and no destination—until he meets Elsie, a military scout who offers a glimmer of hope. Together, they discover that even in a broken world, salvation is hard to find.

THE STORY

IN THE AFTERMATH of a nameless war, the plains have turned to dust and wind. Amid the skeletal remains of the final battle, a scavenger roams the emptiness, driven by hunger, habit, and a flicker of hope that something worth finding still lies beneath the soil. His days are measured in the slow rhythm of digging, listening, and enduring—the rituals of one who survives but no longer truly lives.

When chance leads him to a strange wire stretching endlessly across the wasteland, he follows it with the wary curiosity of someone who’s forgotten why he searches at all. What he discovers is not treasure, but a young soldier suspended between motion and machine—an emissary of a distant, unseen power that still believes the world can be rebuilt. Bound by necessity more than trust, the two travel together through the ruined landscape, their fragile alliance shadowed by what each refuses to reveal.

As they move deeper into the wilderness, the boundaries between purpose and survival, faith and delusion, begin to blur. The scavenger’s hunger—for food, for meaning, for connection—collides with the soldier’s quiet devotion to a cause she can scarcely name. Beneath the endless wire, they become reflections of one another: the relic and the believer, the last echoes of two worlds that once promised a future.
Vagabond Home is a spare and human story about what remains when systems collapse and myths persist—the small, stubborn ways people reach for connection in a world that no longer asks them to.

THE STORY

VAGABOND HOME is a short film about the futility of survival on a war-torn battlefield of the future. Murry Culpepper, a tired vagabond, roams the desolate remains of an old battlefield, scavenging for anything he can sell—or eat. With no destination and no purpose, he’s STRUGGLES to simply survive. When he encounters Elsie, a military scout, he glimpses a flicker of hope on the horizon. But even with her help, he soon finds that in the vast aftermath of a pointless battle, there’s no real salvation.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

At its core, Vagabond Home is a story of dichotomy: the tension between learning to accept and love your own life, and accepting sacrifice in the name of a greater good. I think that both paths carry dignity and both demand a cost.

This is a lens through which I’ve often been told I see the world—one where the gray areas may blur, but still the contrast is stark- . Right and wrong. Ones and zeros. A binary infrastructure shaped by forces beyond my control. I don’t want to fix or change those forces, but I am compelled by the choices they leave us with. Stories about hard decisions resonate deeply: the selfish and the selfless, the immediate and the enduring, the ways one choice ripples outward to shape the future.

Vagabond Home may echo elements of a morality play, but it is not about moralizing. It’s about responsibility. If we struggle to make honest choices for ourselves, how can we ever be trusted to make them for each other? In a broken world, what does survival mean if it comes at the cost of meaning itself?

This film doesn’t seek to answer those questions neatly. Instead, it lingers in the space between survival and sacrifice, where every decision matters and none come free.

WRITER/DIRECTOR

ANDREW JACKSON is a Denver-based writer and filmmaker whose work explores survival, morality, and the quiet absurdity of human connection amid decay. After studying screenwriting and film production in college, Jackson spent over two decades in media production and instructional design-crafting high-stakes training films for aviation and satellite systems-before returning to narrative filmmaking.

Jackson's storytelling draws from a lifelong fascination with the "used-future" aesthetic, the poetry of obsolescence, and the choices people make when survival becomes moral negotiation. He continues to develop work within the expanding Vagabond Home universe-stories that question what remains worth preserving when everything else has fallen apart.

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