’s “Silver Dollar Road” follows the Reels, a Black family in North Carolina battling decades of harassment by land developers trying to seize their waterfront property. In the film, the family matriarch Mamie Reels Ellison and her niece Kim Renee Duhon tell the harrowing story. Both women are doing their best to defend their ancestors’ land and their brothers and uncles, respectively.
You use your own footage as well as footage shot by ProPublica back in 2019. Did you know from the start that you were going to incorporate ProPublica’s footage into the doc? There was an incredible amount of existing material, and I had two choices. It’s either I say, okay, I start the film from scratch, or I use the existing material and see what I could do with it. For me there were real moments of life and real moments of drama so I couldn’t just pass it by and say, well, it doesn’t exist. That footage was an integral part of the project. My job was to figure out how to make a dramatic story using that archive and what I could bring to complete the story.
I appreciated how you chose to end the doc. Everything isn’t tied up in a bow, which it easily could have been. What made you want to end the doc in the way that you did? If I make a documentary, I want it to be different. We are now embedded in a way to look at stories, to look at people as if it’s just another consumer good and I don’t make stories like that. This is a story about people who I know, people that could be my own family. So, the story is not a crime story. The story is not a story about victims. It’s a story about us. At the end of the film I didn’t want drama to define who they are. On the contrary, I wanted to show that the fight continues.
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Source: VanityFair - 🏆 391. / 55 Read more »