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Posted - November 07 2002 : 7:21:52 PM
Up to this, that's what!
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http://www-cds.aas.duke.edu/film/2002happening/hapindex.html
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 24, 2002 Contact: Dawn K. Dreyer
919.660.3680 or dkdreyer@duke.edu
"TOBACCO MONEY FEEDS MY FAMILY" TO PREMIERE
AT DUKE DOCUMENTARY FILM & VIDEO HAPPENING
North Carolina Filmmakers Cynthia Hill and Curtis Gaston Explore
The Human Side of the State's Controversial Crop
Saturday, November 9, 7 p.m.
Richard White Lecture Hall
Duke University, East Campus
Screening followed by:
* Gospel music performance by Willie Marvin Allen
* Conversation with the filmmakers and the farmers featured in the film
* Reception at the Center for Documentary Studies
"I cannot remember tobacco not being the No. 1 crop, nor can my father or my grandfather."
-Melvin Croom, farmer featured in Tobacco Money Feeds My Family
In April 2000, a works-in-progress screening of Tobacco Money Feeds My Family (TMFMF) at the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival (now Full Frame) in Durham drew a great deal of positive attention for filmmakers Cynthia Hill and Curtis Gaston . On November 9, the Documentary Film and Video Happening will premiere the finished work, a feature-length documentary film about tobacco growers, farm workers, and tobacco-dependent communities struggling with the decline of domestic tobacco production. For three years, filmmakers Cynthia Hill and Curtis Gaston documented the lives of three North Carolina tobacco farmers, their families, and their communities. Through the lives of these farmers and Hill's memories of growing up in the tobacco farming community of Pink Hill, the film explores the human side of North Carolina's controversial crop.
Hill, the film's producer and co-director, decided in the late 1990s to return to her home state from New York to work on TMFMF. "When I began this film, I think subconsciously I was hoping to find my childhood memories, to re-create the romantic vision that I had in my head. But the family farms, the operations where school kids and families work together, don't really exist-or they do, but they are disappearing. It's harder to find. They are the exception."
"Some of my first memories are following behind the tractor that was transplanting tobacco into the field," says Hill. "I was four years old. My mother rode on the transplanter, facing backwards, and I walked behind her straightening the baby tobacco plants. She was able to keep an eye on me. She could work and watch me at the same time."
Hill spent each summer until her senior year in high school working her way through the ranks of tobacco field jobs. "The little kids would loop the scraps of tobacco that fell to the ground underneath the barn shelter. When I was eight or nine I was big enough to drive the tractor, just to keep it between the rows. I had to stand up and use both feet to stop. When I'd get to the end of the row, one of the teenage boys would come and turn the tractor around for me. That was my favorite part because I had a crush on one of the boys."
Lives in the community of Pink Hill flowed around tobacco. "It was a real family affair. There would be neighbors and cousins in the fields; parents would bring their kids. It was what you did in the summer." By the time Hill was in high school, working in tobacco fields brought in $25 a day. "It was the money you used to buy school clothes," she remembers. "If the crop wasn't in, the first day of school was delayed."
Going beyond the often-used "how can you morally grow this crop?" style of questioning, this film takes the viewer on a comprehensive journey into the daily world of tobacco farm families, witnessing |
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