Rocktown Coming to a City Near You

Upcoming Screenings:

Thursday, February 5, 2009, 6:30 pm: Harrisonburg, VA, Premier Screening, Court Square Theater

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 6:00 pm: University Of Massachusetts, Amherst, Herter Hall Annex, Rm 227

trailer will be available on this site as of January 8th, 2009! Come back and take a look after the new year.

Harrisonburg, VA Premier Screening Date Set

Rocktown will screen for the first time at the Court Square Theater on Thursday, February 5, 2009. Local musicians Glick & Phillips will play before the screening. We'll keep you posted on all the details as they become available.

Production Assistant Joins the team

A few weeks ago, we were able to bring on the fantastic Sara Versluis as our production asistant, working on the ground in Harrisonburg while we are back home editing. She's our go-to person for everything happening outside of our editing studio!

Rocktown In Production

The production crew grew in the last few weeks, to include production assistant/assistant camera person Sara Versluis, working on the ground in Harrisonburg, and assistant camera person, Dan Madsen.

Leslie & Brian have been busy editing and the final interviews are being wrapped up as we speak. We are very close to setting the first screening date, and are just waiting for some final confirmations, but we know it will be in November of this year and we'll announce the date as soon as it's finalized.

For now, these are recent production stills taken at one of our last interviews.

Rocktown Receives Major Grant Funding!

Earlier this month we learned that we've been selected to receive a Creative Inspiration Grant from the Arts Council of the Valley to help us fund the post-production phase and public screening of Rocktown in Harrisonburg in Fall 2008. The screening will be held at a local theater and will feature a musical performance by local favorites Glick and Philips before the show. date and more details to be announced. For now, it's off to editing we go...

Paper City Films Interviews Stacy Mitchell, Author Of "Big Box Swindle"

We just got back from interviewing Stacy Mitchel in Portland, ME. Stacy is "a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that challenges the wisdom and inevitability of economic consolidation and works to advance policies that support strong local economies and vibrant communities."

Her book, Big Box Swindle, is one of the best, most comprehensive critiques out there of the colonization of our small towns by big box retailers. She was a perfect addition to Rocktown, in that she was able to contextualize many of the issues facing Harrisonburg and it's changing economy and loss of open space, within the larger, national pattern of corporatization.

Grant for Rocktown Covered in Harrisonburg's Daily News Record

Rocktown was among 12 recipients of mini-grants from the Arts Council of the Valley, which recently distributed $6900 in grants. The distribution of the grants, which went to individual artists and organizations as diverse as Thomas Harrison Middle School theater production of "Zink the Zebra," to Next Reflex Dance Collective's project "en Route," to Harrisonburg Rockingham Child Daycare Centers for a children's art exhibit. The Daily News Record reported the full list of recipients and noted that these mini grants are funded through Arts Council of the Valley The Arts Council of the Valley, through funding from the city of Harrisonburg, Rockingham County, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and individual and business donors.

Paper City Films Interviews America's #1 Populist, Jim Hightower

According to his website, Jim Hightower is "a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author," who "has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks." Right now, he's touring 41 cities in six weeks promoting his new book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, which chronicles the stories of regular folks like you and me who are bucking the system and doing extraordinary progressive work thwarting the powers that be.

We met up with him at the beginning of his book tour, and he graciously agreed to an interview. He was able to put the issues facing Harrisonburg--over-development, loss of green space and small-farm agriculture, loss of culture in the face of big-box store homogenization--into a national context for us. Harrisonburg is Every-Town USA: unfortunately, what's happening to my hometown is happening everywhere. Growth, growth, growth seems to be the only way to define progress. We also presented him with a token of our appreciation: a six-pack of local Paper City Brewery's Ireland Parish Golden Ale, which he was very pleased about.

No sneak peaks of this interview, though--you'll have to wait for the finished documentary! But you can watch our footage of his talk at the Pioneer Valley Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

To learn more about Jim Hightower, or to see him speaking as part of his tour, check out his website.

Rocktown Documentary Receives Grant Funding from Valley Arts Council

Paper City Films just received notice that we've been awarded a grant from the Arts Council of the Valley to help with the post-production of the Rocktown documentary! The grant will help with costs associated with taking the now 45+ hours of tape we have and editing it down to a 90 to 120 minute documentary.

As part of the grant application, we wrote, "But where do Harrisonburg's citizens stand in relation to all these changes? What is lost and what is gained? Who stands to benefit and who to lose? These are the questions posed by Rocktown: From the Small Town to the Bog Box. I believe they are important questions for a community to collectively ask and that the conversation should include as many diverse voices as possible. It is my sense that in Harrisonburg, and in every city experiencing these same forces, this conversation happens privately, among neighbors, friends and coworkers who feel powerless amidst these changes and view them as a foregone conclusion. I would like to offer this film to the community I grew up in as a way to start a more public, policy and planning oriented dialog in the city about whether Harrisonburg is transforming into a community its citizens want to live in or whether they have concerns about its development and growth."

Thanks to the Valley Arts Council of Virgina for supporting emerging, independent artists.

Rocktown Gets Blogged!

Our little documentary has come to the attention of one of the bloggers, Brent Finnegan, on hburgnews. You can read what Brent has to say about "Rocktown" in two separate posts on Feb. 1 and Feb. 8, 2008. Brent is a filmmaker working in Harrisonburg and has a recent documentary out on immigration. He's also organized a really interesting documentary screening & discussion group in Harrisonburg. We're starting to get emails from other people interested in the premise of the film--is all this development really a good thing for Harrisonburg?--and it feels like people are yearning for this story to be told. So we're editing as fast as we can.

Clips from the Upcoming Documentary...

Clip of Monica Robinson, resident, teacher and community activist. She lives in the area of the city that used to be called Newtown, a predominantly African-American neighborhood on the north side of the city. Newtown was established as an independent town adjacent to Harrisonburg by freed slaves from the Shenandoah Valley following the Civil War--later, the area was incorporated into the city. During the 1960's, under the guise of "urban renewal," the city razed housing and African-American businesses in this area, which many say the community hasn't recovered from.

This same area continues to have a strong sense of community and now in addition to African Americans, Latinos and immigrant groups are settling there. This has led the city and its police department to dub the community a "weed and seed" district, part of a federal initiative that seeks to "weed" out criminals and "seed" human services in designated high crime areas. Robinson and her neighbors balk at their historic neighborhood being characterized as "weedy," so she and some other volunteers have organized a branch of Copwatch in the city, to advocate for community policing, monitor and try to prevent police abuses and to help people understand their rights in relation to the police. I went on patrol with Copwatch during the filming of this documentary.



Clip of an interview with Todd Hedinger, Harrisonburg resident active in Friends of Blacks Run Greenway, an organization dedicated to preserving the eleven mile long Blacks Run stream that runs through the city and building a greenway trail along the trunk of the Run.



Clip of an interview with Fred Cooper, long-time Harrisonburg resident and folk artist. He would probably shy away from the term folk artist, but I can't think of a better way to describe his work. He has spent the better part of his life's free time outside of work sketching the houses and buildings of the city before they met with the wrecking ball. In years past, when he would hear of a building that was about to be demolished, he would drop what he was doing and run over to preserve it in his notebooks. When he missed drawing a building before it was down, he would do research to find a photograph or old postcard in order to complete his drawing. Sometimes he only had his memory for a guide. His drawings, and there are hundreds and hundreds, comprise an unbelievable history of the lost parts of the city.

What's the Harrisonburg/Rocktown Connection?

There's not much on the web about the origin of the name, but prior to the founding of Harrisonburg, the area was known as "Rocktown," by the settlers passing through along the Wilderness Road, a migration route originally called the "Great Warrior Path" by the Native Americans who traveled it. It seems that the name was in use throughout the 1700's and up until at least 1818, and then it seems to have been lost for a while. There's been a fairly recent resurgence of the use of "Rocktown" in Harrisonburg; while I don't recall ever hearing the name before I left in 1994, it's now the name of a weekly paper in the city, a music venue, a yard shop, a gift shop, a radical info shop, etc.

According to a Mobile Gas Travel website, the area was called Rocktown because of the massive amounts of limestone that forms the basis of much of the city and surrounding area. I haven't been able to find any other document that confirms this, but it seems obvious enough and was my first guess. The county around the independent city of Harrisonburg is Rockingham County, which was named after the Marquis de Rockingham, an English statesman friendly to the area. But the founding of Rockingham Co. occurred long after people started calling Harrisonburg "Rocktown."

I've used Rocktown in the working title of this documentary because I wanted to call up the spirit of the place and it's origins, as a tiny settlement arranged around some natural springs, when things were simpler and there wasn't a Wal*Mart Superstore in every direction (there are two within the city and eight within a 45 mile radius).

The Making of Rocktown the Documentary

In the Spring of 2006, I traveled back to the small town I grew up in in Virginia to shoot a documentary about how my hometown had changed. It had been 12 years since I lived in Harrisonburg, a small town founded in 1779 in the Shenandoah Valley.

But I had visited many times, and each time I saw that something more had been lost. Like many small towns across the U.S., Harrisonburg, VA is struggling through rapid development. Most long-time residents would say it began long before I ever left, when the Valley Mall was cut into the rich, red farmland east of Interstate 81. That was in the '70s, when my mother was attending college and she can remember when there was nothing on that side of the highway but farmland. All of that has changed.

Few areas of the city remain untouched by the combination of factors conspiring to change Harrisonburg: the intense growth of James Madison University, changing from a small, women-only normal school just after the turn of the last century to a student body of more than 17,000 today; the decline of traditional agriculture as the main economic force in the city and the assent of the retail and service industries as the predominant source of jobs; and the complete reshaping of the physical landscape and the local identity and culture precipitated by the twin growth spurts of the university and the retail economy.

Even though I now lived hundreds of miles from my hometown, I felt a personal loss. I first felt this loss when the house I was brought home to as a newborn was torn down, along with those of all the neighbors I had grown up with, in order to accomodate several parking lots and office buildings for JMU. Now my actual street, Patterson St., is, as I write, being removed from the map of the city due to the building of a new academic building for the campus across the street's former entrance. My high school had been leased to JMU; the hospital I was born in has been sold to them as well.

But it wasn't just JMU's movement across Main, across 81, radiating it's growth in all directions from the city that was causing my feelings of loss--it was also that long time residents I knew were chafing against the changes and felt alienated in their own city; that when you drove out on 33 East you could literally become overwhelmed and dizzy by all the chain stores and restaurants, one after another that had cut themselves into the base of the mountains; that people couldn't afford the rents anymore; that the number of hundred year farms was shrinking dramatically; that the city was starting to take on that bland pallor of a place overrun and homogenized--the local was being pushed out by the multi-national. It was no coincident that almost everyone I interviewed, when asked how Harrisonburg had changed over their time there, catagorically exclaimed, "It's just like Northern VA!" If you're not familiar with NOVA, as it's called by it's people, it is the essence of suburban sprawl.

This was the backdrop against which I shot 40 plus interviews with a diverse group of city residents--some supportive of the changes, some against, most bewildered and uncertain about them, and also feeling the loss I felt. I felt that this story was important to tell because it is now a somewhat universal experience, occurring in small towns across the country. It felt like someone should say, "Wait, let's stop and figure this thing out. Is this really what we want?"