When I think about the region where I am from, many words come to mind. Some positive, some negative. In geographical terms the south is beautiful. My home, Tennessee, captures postcard-like mountain scenery and an amazing fall color palette.But the South is no stranger to deleterious stories about its inhabitants. This year, I have thought a lot about what it means to be from the South but not inhabit the historical consciousness of what it means to be Southern.
This year I had the pleasure of attending BIG EARS, a festival that takes place in Knoxville, Tennessee. Not only is BIG EARS a music festival, it is a storytelling experience that bridges gaps through different artistic expressions. A thorough line of transcendent cultural experiences that defies boundaries. Film is one of those experiences.
I caught up with Lily Keber, one of the film curators of this year’s festival. Lily is a filmmaker and educator based in New Orleans. Her directorial debut, “Bayou Maharajah,”premiered at SXSW in 2013 and has since won many awards including the Oxford American Award for Best Southern Film and Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ Documentary Of The Year. Lily co-founded New Orleans Video Voices, a women-led collective dedicated to increasing media literacy across the Gulf South. Lily had this to say about the amazing films screening at this year’s festival:
I always have my eye out for films that I think will resonate specifically with the BIG EARS audience, these films I feel might be a little challenging for a broader audience. I fell in love with BIG EARS because of how open-minded, patient, and present the audiences are for both the music and film events. I’m an Appalachian and I want to take advantage of the geography to showcase important and contemporary work that’s being made in the region. Also, the films don’t have to be music oriented. We’re also having the world premiere of a film called “Liberated Landscapes,” by William Isom, founder of Black in Appalachia. And it’s also exciting to have a film that focuses on the Black Appalachian experience.
I also experienced that the BIG EARS audiences were more open-minded and covered a variety of impactful films. This year’s audience had a lineup of films by very talented female filmmakers. Some of the films included were: “The Tuba Thieves” (directed by Alison O’Daniel), “Sisters with Transistors” (directed by Lisa Rovner), the Knoxville premiere of “Carpet Cowboys” (Emily Mackenzie & Noah Collier), and “American Symphony” (produced by Lauren Domino).
One of the stand-out films was, “O Pioneer,” directed by West Virginia natives Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque. “O Pioneer” moved me in a way that no film, documentary ,or narrative, had in a long time. I was lucky enough to discuss with Clara the deeper meanings behind the film and what it is like to be a female filmmaker. I’m happy to share with you my interview with Clara Lehmann about her film. I was fortunate enough to discuss with Clara the deeper meanings behind the film and what it is like to be a female filmmaker from Appalachia.
We need to talk about your film because – wow, I was blown away. Maybe you watch things when you’re supposed to, you know what I mean? I grew up in Tennessee and my Dad’s from the Appalachian region, so stories about those types of people and characters always really resonate with me, and I just thought it was a beautiful film and done really in a unique way. It didn’t feel like you were documenting. I was just watching the rich lives of people in the area. My favorite storyline was The Chaplain.
He’s amazing and they made it easy because we felt like we were with friends. We picked people that we knew. Access is a big deal with where we live. It’s 45 minutes to the closest grocery store. We wanted to make a movie, but we needed to make a movie that we could make. I’m a mother and he’s a father, and we have a small business, and we’re very involved in our community. So, it came down to these acquaintances, and we’re like, man, we love these people. Let’s just make a movie about them. And so then you feel that in the movie, I think a little bit, and they’re very open, but they’re comfortable. There was a lot of trust.
It felt like you were watching friends. I think that connection you had with those people transcended into what you were watching. It’s infused there. You took great care with all of their stories and them as people, and I felt like they all felt that way. You watch documentaries sometimes and you can tell maybe the people are uncomfortable being filmed or uncomfortable, but this felt like they were among friends.
Documentary is this weird world where you’re not trying to influence your participants, but you’re also trying to make an impactful story that has a thread and themes, but also can engage an audience that has a short attention span and is looking for famous faces. And that’s the struggle we’re facing right now with distribution. As soon as you don’t have famous faces or a really volatile subject in your film, you are immediately admonished, so why would you even make this film? And that’s exactly why we made this film. It was like, we’re so tired of the 1% or whatever the pioneer is that we all are like, that is unreachable. I can’t get there. Even as a filmmaker, I feel it quite often. I will never be at that level, so I’m just going to make what I love.
The whole basis of the film is being a pioneer and you are doing that through making the film. It’s very meta, you, all our pioneers yourselves. And I think to be an independent filmmaker, you have to be a pioneer.
Absolutely. This is what we’re coming to. It’s like, okay, maybe I don’t take credit card debt, but I spend three years either raising money or really being light on spending. When I do corporate work, I save 20% of that corporate money and I put it back into myself. That’s exactly what all of us are forced to do, and then we don’t get a return. But that’s okay. I think it’s an emotional return.
What inspired the idea behind this film? Why did you choose the three people that you did for this film?
Do you know how when you make one film and you suddenly have this big high? I finished it and I released it, and then suddenly you’re very inspired for your next one. I think we’re addicted to that in some ways. I feel like I can’t not do it. I had just completed my first feature, which is called “Born in a Ballroom”, and it’s also a documentary. This film is very personal. Through this film I was fulfilling a promise to my grandmother to write her story, which we didn’t complete until after she passed. The film travels through my journey of healing and sadness of losing her and not having made that promise to finish the film before she passed. But at the same time we are also celebrating her life. We had just premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. It was really exciting. At the premiere I was wearing my grandmother’s skirt. It ripped on the red carpet and I was stapling it together. You’re like, okay, ‘this is cool!’ It was January of 2020, and we didn’t know the pandemic was coming. I was sitting and meditating one night and it came to me, I thought ‘I want to study pioneers.’ And it brought me to the question, ‘What does it mean to be a pioneer?’
I was curious because I had recently read the poem by Walt Whitman “Pioneers, O Pioneers”. My grandmother would recite that poem to us when we were kids. I reread it and was like, ‘oh my gosh, this poem is appalling. I cannot believe you would say, ‘come take this thing as ours and bring your guns, and let’s settle this land.’ I just wanted to be like, ‘well, let’s look at that again.’ And it connected with me now, thinking about different “pioneers,” like this pioneering person in medicine or Elon Musk, he’s pioneering away to Mars. These kinds of things came to mind. We admire them, and yet we’re unaware of the damage it does to be that kind of an explorer with no concern for where you’re going and how you’re getting there. So that’s why we made this film and we wanted to tell it through what I admire about the pioneers. That’s where this idea came from. Then I surrounded myself with amazing filmmakers and artists, and of course participants. Through that process you end up with a kind of different story, but the same story. And that’s what this has evolved to.
We chose subjects, people we admired or knew of in the Appalachian community. Nellie Rose grew up in a community nearby where I grew up. She’s well known in the West Virginia art community because her textile art is really beautiful. James Morley used to preach at our church. I’m not a huge churchgoer. I struggle with my identity within religion, so I was like, this is a way for me to explore my religion in that James speaks to me. I immediately recognize myself and his spiritual identity. And of course, you can’t help but fall in love with this person who is so charming. He has such a nice perspective on love in all of its forms, no matter if you’re gay, lesbian, or heterosexual. It just feels natural. And then Tim, he is someone again that was in our community. He makes beautiful blacksmith wares, and he would come and sell those annually at our community fair. His family was always very intriguing to us because they are so rich in wisdom and ability.
I want to talk a little bit about your narrator, Kaïa Kater. I loved that part of the film. What was your thought process behind including her and having a touchstone of her being the narrator?
Jonathan kept saying, Clara, we’re missing your voice in this. Our participants do a beautiful job of demonstrating this arc of the hero’s journey, and we’ve captured it and we’re here, but how can we make it have a little bit more oomph for an international or national audience? Because it felt a little too narrow in scope, we thought people would say this is just a slice-of-life film. And some people still say that it’s a slice of life, it’s too narrow. But it’s about West Virginians.
Kaïa, while she is not a West Virginian, could elevate this film because she has ties to this community. There’s a very beautiful thing she does by reading the words, but also kind of reminds you – like, ‘hey, this is a reckoning and there’s a deeper meaning here.’ I’m a white filmmaker in West Virginia. I grew up here, but obviously, we have to recognize that a lot of what we’re talking about in this film has a very ugly past. Historically pioneers came in and they were encouraged to go and claim the land and take it. So, Kaïa has this beautiful ability because she’s Canadian Grenadian. She is a black woman playing Appalachian folk music, and she has a song that she wrote that she suggested for the film, “Poets Be Buried”. It is interesting to have her subliminally tell us that you need to look at yourselves, and all of us need to, but I’m going to do it gently in a way that allows you to start to come toward it. And then maybe you’ll read a book that is a little more aggressive, or maybe you’ll go to your neighbor who is not the same skin tone as you or religion as you or whatever it is, and you’ll start to be like, maybe I have a little bit of this wrong. So that was why.
Last question: have you experienced any kind of roadblocks along the way, or even in your path to distribution with being a female filmmaker and being a pioneer in your own right?
Yes, I’m going to be honest with you that these roadblocks are usually subtle and you don’t see them. The reason why I say that is because I don’t know if I can tell you if they have been there, but I am certain they have been. We all know these road blocks exist. It’s been proven over and over. But at the same time, I see where I’ve also been lifted up as a filmmaker as a woman too. As women filmmakers we are trying to make a difference, especially in the arts community. We are trying to bring these voices up and include diverse voices. I’m very proud of that. But if we become complacent, it will shift back very easily. I think that this was probably one of the most diverse and nice groups of folks that I’ve ever gotten to work with. And our crew is 56% women. People worked on this film from all over the world because we had animation and we have unique music and things like that. So we didn’t limit ourselves on location or the people that we collaborated with. We tried very hard to include diversity and be aware of the fact that a lot of the time if you’re lazy, you will end up with a crew on a film that all looks the same. You can’t let that happen. But at the same time, I want someone who is touched by this work, and who feels emotion from this story and wants to work on it. We were able to bring in people that really cared and brought their perspective to the project. And I love that. But yeah, I think that I will never give up, and I will always be aware of some of the things that hold female filmmakers back. But I’m just not going to let it control me and my direction as a filmmaker.
