Just in time to the holidays: Check out this hilarious and brilliant trailer for Ebenezer, a satirical take on filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Nolan, who has helmed several Batman movies, Inception, and the smash hit Oppenheimer, likes to fill his films with mind-twisters involving dreams and time travel. The Ebenezer trailer comes from Paul Roland, a talented young filmmaker in California.
I first met Paul Roland in 2023, when I came across his film Exemplum. Made for $10,000 and shot in black and white, Exemplum tells the story of a priest who goes bad and the repercussions of his actions. Roland wrote, directed, and even stars in the film. The film got great notices, many from conservatives who liked how Roland’s script dealt with the seductive power of evil.
“There’s plenty of promise here that will warrant keeping an eye on Roland,” reviewer Douglas Davidson wrote, “mostly because there’s a daring here to ask big questions within an institution that’s overgrown past its intended purpose. It dramatizes how institutions far too often seek to preserve themselves rather than the ideas that spawned them and they tend to attract like-minded individuals thereby perpetuating problems instead of remaining malleable and within-purpose. Exemplum isn’t afraid to point out the frailty of community constitution and what it looks like when that’s taken advantage of. This makes Exemplum worth ruminating on; this makes what next big question Roland seeks to explore interesting.”
The critic Christian Toto offered this: Exemplum offers something meatier for secular and faith-based audiences alike. Its protagonist’s flaws are obvious, but his journey is both fresh and inviting. You haven’t seen a story like this before, and that’s refreshing.”
Roland’s new project is a radical departure. Punch the Line is a dramatic podcast that explores the lives of kids in a high school improv team. Such things actually existed in California when Roland, 36, was a kid in the 2000s. It stars Nick Searcy, Allegra Edwards, Francis Cronin, and Austin Kane. The cast and crew just wrapped recording and after post-production is aiming for a 2026 release.
“Fans of my work will be shocked to know just how radically Punch the Line departs from Exemplum – a gritty, tech-noir thriller with meditations on Catholic ideas of grace, redemption, and pride,” Roland recently told me. “Punch the Line is neither a thriller nor a spiritual examination but a coming-of-age teen dramedy about a high school competitive improv team in the spirit of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe. Think of the poignancy of The Breakfast Club, the carefree joy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the angsty romance of Say Anything, and the high-stakes competition of The Karate Kid with a touch of the comical zaniness of Whose Line Is It Anyway? all rolled into one magnum opus. As I like to say, it plays like a symphony of the greatest teen movies ever made while setting the stage for its own legacy.”
God bless us, every one!
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