‘Finding Tyler’: Film accepted to premier at RiverRun International Film Festival

by Mary Jo David

Finding Tyler—film about life as a fugitive with ties to Stockbridge—accepted to premier at RiverRun International Film Festival

On May 11, 2021, Finding Tyler: A Journey with an Unpredictable Past will premiere among the 134 films from 24 countries in this year’s RiverRun International Film Festival. The 20-minute submission, directed by Chris Brannan and Diana Reichenbach, both on faculty at the Savannah College of Art and Design, evolved from a full-length documentary produced in 2019.

Finding Tyler focuses on Tyler Johnson, the deceased son of Stockbridge native and award-winning author Patrice Johnson and her husband, local housing renovator Jim Johnson.

The short documentary was one of more than 1,500 films that vied for a slot in this year’s festival. The RiverRun Festival, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is an Academy Award qualifying festival in the Documentary Short and Animated Short categories.

An accomplished quantum physicist who earned the Presidential Merit Scholarship from his dream school, the California Institute of Technology—or Caltech as most refer to it, Tyler graduated with a bachelor of science degree and set off to teach at the University of New Mexico and earn his PhD. As it happened, one ill-advised incident over a celebratory weekend back in Pasadena cut short a brilliant career and resulted in this promising physicist instead being labeled an alleged eco-terrorist.

As a result, in his early twenties, Tyler fled the U.S. and, after time spent in Amsterdam, Paris, and Marseilles, lived out the rest of his days as a fugitive on the island of Corsica off the coast of France.

Far away from family and friends, save for his long-time romantic partner, Yuki, who accompanied Tyler on this journey, the film concentrates on Tyler’s time in Corsica. Although only twenty-minutes long, the short documentary brings Tyler to life through old family photos, personal journal entries that chronicled his time on Corsica, and many firsthand accounts from those who knew him best in France.

Finding Tyler also describes some of what his family was going through back home, wondering and worrying about Tyler, dealing with their feelings of anxiety, terror, helplessness, and desperation. “He didn’t dare write regularly,” explains Patrice in the documentary, “But he did write once a year—usually after Christmas—but we still didn’t know where he was, and he couldn’t let us know.”

Tyler’s own time-lapse footage, which was reclaimed from his camera after friends sent it to his parents, is featured in parts of the film. It is at once both stunning and breathtaking. Viewers can imagine the time he spent scaling mountain peaks, with his head literally in the clouds. They might even begin to think his new, exciting life made up for the years he spent away from family and his old life. But entries in his personal journals his parents discovered on their trip to Corsica after Tyler’s body was recovered from the base of a mountain avalanche reinforce that life was not easy for this fugitive. In fact, Tyler’s heart was still deeply grounded in his old life and with his family almost 5,000 miles away.

I’ve been confined in this island for longer than I care to remember…

Still trapped today, longing for my country, for my family, and all left behind. I no longer recognize my voice in my maternal language…

I want Math, I want to see my friends and family again, and I want to sail into atolls and uninhabited islands to watch the sunset and to hear the waves.

(Source: Journal entries from the The Fall and Rise of Tyler Johnson and referenced in the Finding Tyler documentary.)

In the lead-up to creating the documentary, director Brannon made multiple trips to France and Corsica to meet those who knew Tyler and to see where he lived and how he survived as a fugitive without papers. Corsica is, as a French attorney who worked with Tyler put it, “A place where people don’t ask questions.” A French journalist in the film explains, “Corsica could be some piece of Texas lost in the Mediterranean Sea…We are an island of secrets.”

In preparing their documentaries, the directors also traveled to Stockbridge to meet with Tyler’s mom and dad and his sister Kelsey, visiting with her husband, Eric, from Colorado.

“For [the Johnsons] to trust us with their story—Tyler’s story—means everything,” director Brannon remarked. “The opportunity to make this film has already been one of the most, if not the most, rewarding experiences of my filmmaking career.”

Patrice and Kelsey are both featured in the documentary, and there are moments for those who know them, and maybe for those who don’t, when the viewer may need to grab a tissue.

“He wanted to use math for the benefit of the world and to leave his mark,” says Tyler’s mom in the film. Although the occasions for using his math skills were severely curtailed as a fugitive, you learn through Patrice’s first book that Tyler made use of every opportunity to keep his physics skills sharp and to use his scientific mind to help those who were worse off than him—even against almost insurmountable odds.

Patrice, who is working on her second book, a standalone sequel titled Tyler’s Ledge, about Tyler’s last two years living as a fugitive, has won national awards for her first book, The Fall and Rise of Tyler Johnson (available on Amazon in paperback and on the Kindle).

Says Brannon, “While I believe our film to be as thorough as we could make it in 20 minutes, it really is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to Tyler’s story; we hope that this film can help inspire others to learn more about Tyler through her books.”

To anyone reading about Tyler through his mother’s works or viewing the documentary through the eyes of those who only got to know him after he was gone, one thing is clear—a single act of recklessness by an otherwise brilliant, kind, and optimistic young man has the potential to derail a young life, regardless of how promising that life may be.

To that end, the foreword in Patrice’s first book, written by Tyler’s sister Kelsey, carries great hope:

“To all of us who have made mistakes that seem irreversible, let us trust that repair is always an option…potential for repair always exists…our mistakes may fuel deep learning and relationships and wisdom.”

Finding Tyler competed against more than 1,500 film entries from around the world to be among the 134 films accepted to compete in this year’s RiverRun International Film Festival.