Gunfighter Paradise

7/29/2026

> **"\[...\] fathers often deploy their sons as religious mercenaries. And this is how the father barters his way into heaven -- by teaching the son how to harvest a soul."** Writer and director Jethro Waters' **GUNFIGHTER PARADISE** functions as scathing visual essay on America's shambolic obsession with religion and guns -- with fathers and sons superstitiously stumbling through their God-abandoned universe. Or North Carolina. The film begins with a characteristically acerbic and telling quote from Mark Twain: ***“Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.”*** Waters' film draws heavily from Freudian tropes and