Meet the Filmmaker:  Live in-person Q&A with the members of Five Eight, Producers Jackie Schoknecht, Geoff Melkonian and Director Marc Pilvinsky in conversation with acclaimed musician Tierney Tough (The Pauses).

After being institutionalized for schizophrenia and manic-depression in his early 20s, Mike Mantione turned to songwriting as a way of dealing with his demons. For 30 years, loud guitars have kept those demons at bay.

The band’s whirlwind tale is primarily told through the voices of its own current band members—Mantione, guitarist Sean Dunn, bassist Dan Horowitz and drummer Patrick Ferguson—who are able to look back on both their successes and shortcomings with humor, acceptance and remarkable tenderness towards each other. Outside perspectives are offered from friends and contemporaries such as Bill Berry (R.E.M.), Amy Ray (Indigo Girls), Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers), Vanessa Briscoe Hay (Pylon Reenactment Society), David Barbe (Mercyland) and Velena Vego (40 Watt Club).

Meet the Filmmaker – Five Eight

Athens, GA band Five Eight was the vehicle of singer/guitarist Mike Mantione, a self-professed manic depressive whose music exorcised his personal demons in grim detail. Debuting in 1989 with the self-released Passive-Aggressive cassette, the band — which also comprised longtime bassist Dan Horowitz, guitarist Sean Dunn and drummer Patrick ‘”Tigger'” Ferguson — resurfaced two years later with Inflatable Sense of Self. Signing to the Sky label, in 1992 Five Eight issued their first full-length CD, I Learned Shut Up, releasing The Angriest Man a year later; however, after 1994’s Weirdo, the group spent the mid-1990s largely out of the spotlight, finally returning in 1997 with the Ed Stasium-produced Gasolina! That winter both Dunn and Ferguson abruptly left the lineup, and with new drummer Mike Rizzi, Five Eight issued 1999’s “The Road Beat the Shit Out of My Favorite Band,” a split single with Clemente. The full-length The Good Nurse followed on Deep Elm in the spring of 2000. Five Eight returned in 2004 with a self-titled CD, the first to be released by the band itself.