Past Featured Films

Martha in Lattimore
(DOCUMENTARY - Running Time: 44 minutes, 56 seconds)
Mary M. Dalton

The first thing you notice when meeting Martha Mason is the bright yellow iron lung that encases her body and helps her breathe just as it has since 1948 when, at age 11, she contracted polio. She has lived in this life-saving machine longer than anyone else in the world, and she has lived most of those days in Lattimore, a small town located in southwestern North Carolina.  At first the image and sound of the iron lung are distracting if not shocking, but soon after talking with Martha, the massive, metal cylinder becomes inconsequential because it is so greatly exceeded by her spirit. She says that she has survived for so many years—while so many others with the same disease died—because of the exceptional care she received from her parents and community and because she has always been driven to learn.  Her personal story has long inspired her friends and neighbors, but Martha has been a private person for most of her life. With the assistance of her voice-activated computer, she wrote her autobiography, Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung. In the months since its publication, however, Martha has heard from people the world over who found something in her story that moved them, motivated them, or otherwise resonated with their personal experiences. Martha in Lattimore tells Martha’s story in the context of Lattimore, NC, the little town that has nurtured her throughout her life.

Filmmaker Profile: MARY M. DALTON

Martha in Lattimore, which won Best Documentary at the Real to Reel Film Festival in 2005 and accepted by SILVERDOCS in 2006, is the seventh documentary produced and directed by Mary Dalton. Her documentaries have been screened at various festivals, museums, galleries, and libraries. Three of Dalton's films have aired on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Visions.

Dalton's second film, Sam McMillan: The Dot Man, was named Best Independent Documentary at the Carolina Film and Video Festival in 2003, and Tom Whitaker: Potter at Large won the Audience Award and Best Documentary at HPIFF in 2004. Mary teaches media studies at Wake Forest University, is a media critic for NPR affiliate, WFDD-FM, and is the author of scholarly works including a book, The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. She is co-editor, with Laura R. Linder, of the anthology The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. She lives in Jamestown, NC with her fourteen-year-old son.

Local Angles:

• The subject of Martha in Lattimore is from Lattimore, NC, (in Cleveland County) and has lived in an iron lung longer than anyone else in the world. 
  
• Mary Dalton lives in Jamestown, NC, (in Guilford County) and teaches at Winston-Salem's Wake Forest University (in Forsyth County).