Beth Skogen
A man looking into a complicated motion picture camera.
Michael Neelsen framing up a shot.
If you were living in Wisconsin at the time you knew the Monfils case. If you don’t recall the name, it’s the one where the victim was found dead in a vat of paper pulp in Green Bay. That you remember. The documentary Beyond Human Nature opens with a cold, unwavering aerial shot of the paper plant, then switches to archival footage of Tom Monfils in a training video for the company. “Was he a happy person? Was he accepted by his peers?” asks the voice over. These turn out to be key questions.
Filmmaker Michael Neelsen didn’t have true crime in mind for his next project when he was showing his first film, the insightful Last Day at Lambeau, at the Green Bay Film Festival in 2013. After the screening, advocates for the so-called “Monfils Six,” the six co-workers convicted of Monfils’ murder, approached Neelsen and “said they had our next story for us.”
The conviction and life sentences for the six men “split the city of Green Bay down the middle,” says Neelsen. Coincidentally, that’s a description that could also hold true for his first film, about the feelings of Packers fans after quarterback Brett Favre defected to archrivals the Minnesota Vikings.
Neelsen calls Beyond Human Nature, which screens April 15 at The Marquee at Union South, “an honest and curious depiction of lingering mystery.”
It includes re-enacted (but silent) scenes as well as animation, historic news footage and new interviews with key figures, including some that went “12 hours over two days.”
“I was not interested in making an advocacy piece,” says Neelsen, who cites filmmakers Errol Morris and Werner Herzog as influences. “I personally check out as a viewer when I feel like the filmmaker is pushing one direction on me. I want to hear the different perspectives articulated.” And despite the media attention the Monfils case received, Neelsen says he doesn’t believe there has been a comprehensive telling of the story before Beyond Human Nature.
Neelsen has always loved film. At Memorial High School in Madison he made a number of videos; his first jobs were at movie theaters. He went to film school in Los Angeles and now lives in Milwaukee.
The film took nine years to make. “Nine years of doing it and not crossing the finish line was hard,” says Neelsen, who funded the film himself with the help of friends, and worked on it while also running a video-based branding and consulting business. The film was mostly done before the pandemic hit, but Neelsen decided to wait before taking it on the film fest circuit.
Beyond Human Nature was “made with almost an entirely Wisconsin crew, it’s a Wisconsin story, funded by and willed out of nothing by Wisconsinites,” says Neelsen, “And now it’s going nationwide and throughout the world. It’s just kind of a cool thing.”
See our other 2023 Wisconsin Film Fest coverage here.
