Isak Borg

Borg was born on a humble farm in Sweden in 1964. After an accident left him orphaned, he was adopted by Texas cattle ranchers who found him on the streets of Stockholm. He spent the remainder of his youth running cattle all day and watching the movie "Giant" all night to learn English. At 17 he set out on his own, and landed at 19 in flophouse in St Louis where he met poet Charles Bukowski who encouraged him to write and to drink. After losing several years of this, he sobered up and took a job as a coal miner in West Virginia. There he honed his story telling skills, entertaining his co-workers with tales of love and violence. His next stop was New York City, where he began to write in earnest and had his first unpublished work of short stories ("Coal Heart") turned into an Off-Off-Broadway play. By 1990 he had quit writing and took a job as a dog walker. A chance encounter with Dena Hysell made way for a collaboration on what would become the feature film "The Factory," produced in 2013. "The APP" soon followed, which Borg co-wrote and co-directed.