I hate prejudice and stereotyping. My experiences with the people of the North Carolina mountains where I made several films is that they were and are spectacular people and the most creative expressive people I have ever been with. They have problems these days with opioids and that is so sad. I was treated wonderfully as a northerner would come there to film their music and dance and storytelling and culture because I had loved it from afar from the time I was a teenager. This is a clip from a longer documentary I made on the great North Carolina mountain folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford. He spent his life collecting folksongs, stories, dances, and more from his people and presenting them at a festival he created in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1929. He also recorded hundreds of songs from memory for the Library of Congress and The National Archives.
In order to create this documentary, I spent a year searching for old footage and finding folks to interview who were there to experience these events, now long gone. My resulting one-hour documentary tells the story of Bascom but goes beyond him to give a sense of these great musicians and dancers and how they struggled against prejudice. Hollywood is the cause but in fact, this prejudice, this putting down people, this belittling the Appalachian people, was going on long before
17 ноя 2014
