Documentary Filmmaker: Full Frame Fest Films Eye Injustices--History

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(Free-Press-Release.com) April 14, 2007 -- In making his movie "Banished," Williams discovered that Harrison, Ark., remains a town that's almost exclusively white a place where the Confederate flag still flies outside the city's Chamber of Commerce. One resident Williams interviews says without hesitation that he moved to the town of about 12,000 because it was a place that only about a dozen blacks call home.

"There were much more virulent, racist things that he said that didn't have any necessity for the film," Williams said. "He says he moved here because of the absence of blacks you know exactly who they are. It's as clear as it needs to be."

But Williams' film moves beyond cataloguing such racism, studying instead how some black descendants of those expelled from Harrison and two other communities are attempting reconciliation while also seeking reparations money, land, memorials, headstones and some sort of a visible apology.

"It's a complex issue about redress and reparations, how to resolve a past atrocity," Williams said. "It's not as simple as saying, `I want that back.'"

Redress of past wrongs is also the theme of the films that make up the "Southern Sidebar" at this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, which in its 10th year continues to be one of the nation's leading events for documentary films. The festival begins Thursday and continues through Sunday.

"I think the one thing you have to recognize is that even with the most heartfelt and good intentions, (reconciliation is) not always successful," said Nancy Buirski, the festival's founder and artistic director. "And you have to deal with that, too, as a possibility. But that doesn't mean one shouldn't try."

Along with Williams' film, the Southern Sidebar includes the world premiere of "Moving Midway," the story of man's investigation into the history of his family and their slaves. Both films will be shown Saturday.

Also playing: "Greensboro: Closer to the Truth," a movie that examines the work of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The panel, modeled on historic reconciliation efforts in South Africa and Peru, investigated the deaths of five Communist Workers Party organizers who were killed in a 1979 shootout with Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen during a "Death to the Klan" rally.

Among those who testified before the panel, a grass-roots effort not supported by city leaders, was Signe Waller, whose husband, Bill, was one of the five killed, and former Klansmen Gorrell Pierce and Virgil Griffin.

While the commission concluded that Greensboro police were largely to blame for the violence they knew white supremacists planned to attend the march but failed to take any action director Adam Zucker deals with the angry events in a quiet way. He includes interviews with both Jim Melvin, Greensboro's mayor in 1979, and former Nazi Wayne Wood. While Wood apologizes, Melvin does not.

"I probably have more admiration for them now, how they've dealt with this over a quarter of a century," Zucker said of the former Communists Workers Party members. "Signe Waller ... she has come to understand that people can change. She does accept when Wayne Wood comes begging for her forgiveness."

It's the possibility of that sort of transformation that attracted Zucker to the story, "that people can evolve like that. I find that very powerful."

As one of the final offerings of the four-day festival, "Greensboro" will be shown Sunday at a free screening, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Hodding Carter III, a professor of leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a spokesman during the Carter administration.

"The fact that we're not just dealing with conflict, but we're also dealing with the efforts that people are making at resolving conflict and coming to some sort of emotional and psychological truth about conflict is a step in the right direction," Buirski said.

Source: http://movies.yahoo.com

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