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 co-producer and 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 their struggles and frustrations as they try to raise their much embattled crop. The resulting work presents these people as they are rarely seen—as human beings, men and women with great personal strengths, and flaws, whose love of the tilled earth is rivaled only by their love of family and reverence for their agrarian heritage.

The screening of TMFMF will be followed by a gospel music performance by Willie Marvin Allen, one of the farmers featured in the documentary, and a conversation with the filmmakers and farmers featured in the film. Afterwards, a reception will be held at the Center for Documentary Studies.

The premiere of TMFMF is part of the Seventh Annual Documentary Film and Video Happening, November 8-10, 2002. Presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Duke Program in Film and Video, the Happening brings together novice and experienced filmmakers and videographers, faculty, and documentary enthusiasts for workshops, presentations, discussions, and screenings of curated and submitted documentary film and video pieces. For more information on the Happening, please go to http://cds.aas.duke.edu and click on the Happening logo, or contact Dawn Dreyer at dkdreyer@duke.edu or 919-660-3680.

Tobacco Money Feeds My Family is a fiscally sponsored project of the Southern Documentary Fund and Educational Media Foundation. Major support for the film was provided by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Hillsdale Fund, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the North Carolina Arts Council, Carolina Power and Light, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Flue Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corporation, and Daniel Kramer.

THE FARMERS

Melvin Croom, a white tenant farmer in his late fifties who farms twenty acres of tobacco in Lenoir County, refers to tobacco farming as "being in my blood." We see Croom’s wife, Mary Anne, smiling as she remembers him calling from Army boot camp to see how the tobacco season was going. "He’d call me at his mother’s house and all he wanted to know was how much tobacco had been barned, how much was left to be barned, how much tobacco had sold, and how much was left to be sold. Come to think of it, he didn’t really call to talk to me much."

Since the late 1940s, seventy-three-year-old African American sharecropper Willie Marvin Allen has farmed a small plot of land near Durham. We hear him singing, his voice resonant and purposeful, carrying over the weathered woodwork of an eighty-year-old tobacco barn, then to fields beyond. Allen has witnessed many changes in the tobacco farming industry, most of which he has strongly resisted. Despite these dramatic shifts and the tough times that have accompanied them, he firmly believes he will not see the end of tobacco farming in this country in his lifetime.

Ernie Averett is a white, forty-five-year-old seventh-generation farmer who employs migrant workers to help cultivate ninety acres of tobacco on his family’s farm near Oxford. At the end of the 1999 growing season, Ernie and his wife, Phyllis, become first-time parents. This new addition to the Averett family causes Ernie, who at the beginning of the film speaks forcefully of tobacco’s enduring power, to now openly questioning its future. "I want this business to survive past my time, so that my son can have the opportunity to carry on for the ninth generation. The opportunity for him, his time, could very well be denied to him."

THE FILMMAKERS

Tobacco Money Feeds My Family is produced and co-directed by Cynthia Hill, photographed and co-directed by Curtis Gaston, and edited by Michael Davey and Cynthia Hill. Musical score for the film is by Chuck Johnson of Shark Quest.

Cynthia Hill is co-producer/director and co-editor for Tobacco Money Feeds My Family. She grew up in Pink Hill, North Carolina, where many of her family members, friends, and neighbors farmed tobacco. Hill began her production career working on health education media. For four years she worked as an editor at GLC Productions, a post-production facility in New York City whose clients included MTV, PBS, Lifetime, Nickelodean, and many others. Currently Hill is co-producing February One, a documentary film about the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-ins—an event credited with re-igniting the civil rights movement.

Curtis Gaston is co-producer and director of photography for the project. He is a veteran filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina, whose credits include Brother, an Emmy Award-winning documentary about his relationship with his older brother who suffers from cerebral palsy, and Quarterback, an award-winning documentary that aired on North Carolina Public Television. In June 2000 he received a North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship for his work on Tobacco Money Feeds My Family and an Arts and Science Council grant for work on a documentary film about the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina. Gaston received both a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently a graduate student at Duke University.

Michael Davey, a painter and editor who lives in Durham, is co-editor of Tobacco Money Feeds My Family. He has worked in the production business for almost twenty years and during that time has edited a wide variety of projects, including documentaries for Discovery, The Learning Channel, Discovery Health, and Animal Planet.

For event information contact the Center for Documentary Studies at 919.660.3663 or docstudies@duke.edu.

For information about Tobacco Money Feeds My Family contact Cynthia Hill at 919.682.6795 or hill.cynthia@verizon.net.