A VERY SOUTHERN EXPERIENCE (Mark & Cheri)

Cheri generally scouts “experiences” for us.

Friday’s came courtesy of a fantastic web site – NC Tripping – that covers the whole State.  Our top two choices were a hot sauce festival in a small town northeast of Durham, or a film being shown at a film festival not even an hour from home.  We chose the showing of Bright Leaves at the Full Bloom Film Festival in Statesville.

The area was settled in the mid 1700’s and was recognized by the State in 1789.  It is home to about 30,000 people, and one interesting horse.

We had the entire afternoon to wander around before film festival, and the weather was quite nice.  We parked near the courthouse and began walking.  This very vintage building, now a sporting goods store, was just behind where we parked.  It has a tremendous number of different textures and colors for one building:

The city has some very interesting architecture.  This building was originally a bank:

In 1833, the railway was laid to connect the area to the rest of the country.  By the 1850’s, Statesville was known for Bright Leaf tobacco, whiskey, and as a distribution center for herbs and roots.

Walking by this building was interesting.

It had a very strong scent of leather, and maybe tanning chemicals.  We wondered just how long it had been since it had last been painted; the colors are strong, but the style very old.

I imagine at some point a stairway connected this door to the ground level:

Currently if you stepped out you would have about a second to wonder what was happening before you hit the sidewalk.

Around the corner, you can see the remains of the word "Dentist" in gold leaf in the second story window, if you look carefully:

This is a sculpture across the street from the current City Hall:

You can also see City Hall reflected in the window of this shop:

We sat outside and shared a coffee gelato and crème brulee cheesecake while watching the world go by.  (We are definitely enjoying retirement.)

Finally, a couple of beautiful planters near the intersection of the two main streets in old downtown:

When it came time to see the film, I – Cheri - felt like I was re-living an evening from about 30 years ago.  I’d gone to represent a school district at a City Council meeting on a hot, still summer evening, in an agricultural town near Sacramento.  Willows, maybe?  Williams?  As the time for the City Council meeting drew near, people started walking toward the historic town hall, across a large park.

This is what it was like in Stateville last night.  Everyone was headed the same direction, towards the central building on the horizon, a historic edifice that had been part of an 1800's women's college, now part of the downtown community college:

Not as hot as that summer night in the Sacramento Valley, but pleasantly warm.

Once we got inside, past the short red carpet and made-for-Instagram photo background, it seemed that everyone knew each person they saw in the small auditorium, overhung with the beautiful balcony.  Many more of the audience did actually know each other quite a bit more than we knew.

The documentary being shown was by a movie-maker whose parents had grown up a block apart from each other there in Statesville, and since the film dealt largely with the legacy of his family’s involvement in the North Carolina tobacco industry, about 25-30 extended family members had joined the audience.  (A local family member joked that he was going to order from Bojangles Chicken the next day and count this as his branch’s contribution to the rotating annual Thanksgiving Dinner!)

Bright Leaves was actually released – at the Cannes Film Festival, no less – over 20 years ago, in 2003, and received several nominations and awards.

Ross McElwee, who made the film, is very modest and has an extremely dry sense of humor.  Just before he came to the stage, the film festival’s administrator said that Mr. McElwee had just retired from teaching in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Mr. McElwee opened his remarks by saying that he appreciated being asked to bring the film to this festival, several times.  His difficulty was that “the first week of school at the university where I taught [recall . . . Harvard] is always the same week as this festival.”  He went on to say “I thought and thought about what I could do and then realized – I could quit my job!”

Wikipedia quotes Roger Ebert about Bright Leaves:

Bright Leaves is not a documentary about anything in particular. That is its charm.
It's a meandering visit by a curious man with a quiet sense of humor, who
pokes here and there in his family history and the history of tobacco.

True and not-true, at the same time.  The movie was about a lot, more than I can summarize here.  There is a really great review/summary at IMDB, about halfway down the page.

The movie is definitely worth watching if you run across it, on Amazon or elsewhere.  Just don't confuse it with Bright Leaf, the 1950 Gary Cooper-Lauren Bacall-Patricia Neal movie that was its instigation.  (It's a long story, one more reason I can't summarize the film here!)