NOTE: High resolution images

UNC-TV Airs Documentary Exploring Demise of NC’s Tobacco Culture
TOBACCO MONEY FEEDS MY FAMILY PACKS A DIFFERENT PUNCH
Premieres Thursday, Oct. 6, at 10 PM

Thursday, October 6, at 10 PM, UNC-TV premieres Tobacco Money Feeds My Family, a new documentary about tobacco growers, farm workers and tobacco-dependent communities struggling with the decline of domestic tobacco production. Filmmakers Cynthia Hill and Curtis Gaston documented three North Carolina tobacco farmers, their families and communities. Unlike many tobacco films, that question the morality of pursuing the crop, this film offers a comprehensive look at the realities of working tobacco families for a rarely seen view of their struggles and triumphs.

Shot over a period of five years Tobacco Money Feeds My Family is a wistful yet clear-eyed portrait of a centuries old North Carolina culture in crisis. In this remarkable documentary, Hill and Charlotte resident Gaston revisit the tobacco country of Hill’s youth and find three diverse farm families who—despite facing a rapidly changing industry, deep cuts in government quotas, the swaying of popular opinion, and the realities of global economy—struggle to maintain their lifes’ works.

Growing up in Pink Hill’s tobacco farming community, Hill spent each summer until her senior year in high school working in the tobacco fields. "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. 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."

In the course of 60 minutes, the viewer is provided an intimate and detailed look into the vanishing world of a centuries old culture. Honest, mournful, and subtly heartbreaking, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family is a meditation on the bonds of community, richness of the Earth, and abundant memories of a rapidly expiring way of life. From the first fog-shrouded planting in the spring to the frenzy of an autumn tobacco marketplace, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family sensitively chronicles the numerous joys—and heartbreaks—of a people whose love of family, God, and community is rivaled only by the fertile soil beneath their feet and the redolent smells of curing tobacco.

For Hill it is a chance to get people talking about the issues, “Tobacco has shaped many of our communities and we must ask the question, “What will we do when it is gone? How will we identify ourselves? And more importantly, what about the farmers and others employed by the industry—what will they do? These are issues that affect almost everyone in North Carolina.”

At a time when cigarette manufacturers are reeling from declining consumption and a $246 billion settlement with 46 states, North Carolina’s small farmers are undergoing a devastating upheaval of their own. After years of declining quotas, farmers are pinning their hopes on a federal buyout of tobacco allotments—a program that may cost upwards of $14 billion. But as Tobacco Money Feeds My Family makes clear, no matter how the issue is resolved, today’s farmers are facing the end of a way of life.

As part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, tobacco growers accepted annual production quotas, based largely on cigarette manufacturers’ demand, in exchange for price guarantees. Growers flourished under the quota system for decades; but today that is not the case. “For years, cigarette companies kept small North Carolina farmers in business as a sympathetic front to argue against higher taxes and regulation, but after the tobacco settlement, that all changed,” says Hill. “Following this political and economic setback, the companies have turned to buying cheap tobacco from overseas growers.” With this ever-decreasing domestic production of tobacco, calls for a buyout of the quotas intensified and in late 2004 President Bush signed into law a federal buyout of the quota system.

Hill, who is the director of the film, shares a deep personal connection to the plight of Tar Heel tobacco farmers. A native of Pink Hill, NC, she grew up helping tend the crop on her grandfather’s tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina. “My grandfather used to be a tobacco farmer,” notes Hill, “I say ‘used to’ because, when I was 10, he was unable to keep up with changing technology and increases in labor costs and was forced to stop farming. I continued to help friends and neighbors on their tobacco farms until I went away for college, but now that way of life seems so far away.”

When Hill and Gaston began shooting in 1998, they decided to structure the film to follow the course of a growing season, from the February planting of the seedlings in greenhouses, to the sweltering August harvest, to the frenzied, make-or-break November auctions. Rather than giving a top-down, academic survey, the film is told in an intensely personal fashion, through Hill’s memories and the eyes of three very different farmers.

One farmer is 73-year-old African-American tenant farmer Willie Marvin Allen, who tills a small plot near Durham and provides a window into a sharecropping system often thought to have gone the way of the Model T and the vacuum tube radio. Until five years ago, Allen lived in a house with no running water that was provided by his landlord. Despite his hardships, Allen provides the film with some of its most eloquent and poignant moments, such as a scene in which we learn about his stirring eulogy at a funeral for a deceased (and similarly impoverished) friend and neighbor.

Another tenant farmer featured in the film is Melvin Croom, a humble, unaffected white man in his late fifties. We see his fervent attachment to his farming community and the pleasure he takes in providing employment to local laborers. In a telling twist of fate, we discover that his declining health and declining business, has forced Croom to rely on his off-farm job at a funeral parlor.

In contrast to Allen and Croom, the third farmer in the film, Ernie Averett, actually farms his own land. A 45-year-old seventh generation tobacco farmer, Averett’s economic position is less precarious than those who must lease the land that they work and, indeed, he provides seasonal employment to dozens of local and migrant laborers. Still, Averett knows that his ancestral occupation is on the wane and by film’s end he has run successfully for Granville County Commissioner, where he plans to advocate for the interests of tobacco growers. However, he laments the uncertain future, wondering aloud if there will still be a farm to pass on to his newborn son.

Allen, Croom and Averett represent a dying breed. In Tobacco Money Feeds My Family, the three men stand as sympathetic witnesses to the communal bonds that were forged when tobacco was king and a telling reminder of the certain demise of tobacco culture.

Amidst these stories, the film does not flinch from the ethical issues of growing a carcinogenic crop. Rather, what emerges is the urgent need to preserve these traditional rural communities—if not the crop that sustained them. “Maybe getting rid of tobacco makes sense,” Hill suggests. “It’s just that no one has paid much attention to the difficulties this decision poses for the farmers whose lives still rely on growing tobacco.”

Tobacco Money Feeds My Family has screened in over 25 festivals nationally and internationally including the Austin Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Filmstock International Film Festival (UK), Cucalorus Film Festival, Asheville Film Festival, Riverrun Film Festival and the IndieMemphis Film Festival.

Hill, who co-produced February One, a recent documentary about the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, produced and co-directed Tobacco Money Feeds My Family. It was photographed and co-directed by Curtis Gaston; and edited by Michael Davey and Cynthia Hill. Chuck Johnson of Shark Quest created the film’s musical score.

Explore the human side of North Carolina’s controversial crop through Tobacco Money Feeds My Family, Thursday, October 6, at 10 PM, on UNC-TV.

Tobacco Money Feeds My Family is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to producing programs for and about North Carolina. Member-supported UNC-TV’s 11 stations comprise North Carolina’s only statewide television network, made possible through a unique partnership of public investment and private support.

—UNC-TV—

ABOUT CYNTHIA HILL & CURTIS GASTON…

Cynthia Hill is 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, Nickelodeon, and many others. Recently, Hill co-produced February One, a documentary film about the 1960 Greensboro, NC, lunch counter sit-ins, that aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. Hill’s current film project The Guestworker, (co-directed by Charles Thompson and photographed by Gaston) was selected to screen as a work in progress at the Independent Feature Project (IFP) in NYC this month. Hill is also the co-founder of the Southern Documentary Fund, a support organization for documentary artists across the South.

Curtis Gaston is co-producer and director of photography for Tobacco Money Feeds My Family. He is a veteran North Carolina-based filmmaker whose credits include Brother, an Emmy Award-winning documentary about his relationship with his older brother who suffers from cerebral palsy, and Quarterback, also an award-winning documentary that aired on North Carolina Public Television. More recently, his short film, “The Flag Day Parade” was a documentary finalist at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. In 2000, Gaston received the NC Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship for his work on Tobacco Money Feeds My Family and an Arts and Science Council grant for his work on his in-progress documentary film on the Confederate flag issue in SC. He is currently working on a film about North Carolina musician, David Childers.

FUNDING

Tobacco Money Feeds My Family was produced with private and in-kind contributions and with the generous assistance of the following organizations:

·       Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation
·       North Carolina Humanities Council
·       North Carolina Arts Council
·       The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation
·       Hillsdale Fund
·       Progress Energy
·       Flue—Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corp.
·       Freedman Family Fund
·       Felix Harvey Foundation
·       NC State Grange
·       East Carolina Farm Credit
·       NC Farm Bureau
·       J.C. Howard Farms
·       Brightbelt Warehouse Association