REEL SOUTH

The site of the original settlement of the Cherokee, the Kituwah mound, was thought lost for centuries. In her moving retelling of the efforts to reclaim the tribe’s land, former Chief Joyce Dugan and fellow tribe members foreground the spiritual, emotional, and social impact of Kituwah’s legacy. This is the story of how the Cherokee finally took their “land back.”

Unrestricted access to beaches is a public right in Texas. But for the little known, magical, and untamed stretch of beach called Boca Chica, that right is curtailed when SpaceX takes flight. Boca Chica uncovers the mesmerizing beauty of this fragile coastline and the fight for free access for its longtime visitors whose memories and spirituality are rooted deep among the sandy shorelines.

A Black scientist brings together local Black farmers to combat the effects of climate change and create opportunities in Black agriculture for new generations in the Arkansas delta.

One El Paso filmmaker calls on her Indigenous and Mexican ancestors to explore the cyclical starvation of the Rio Grande river and the human and inhumane factors contributing to the disappearance of its culture and bounty.

In Southern Virginia, Black farmers like Cecil Shell balance their interests in honoring their tradition of tobacco farming against the onset of solar energy farms exploding across the region. Through Cecil, the film explores one rural county’s shifting economic interests and his own efforts to steward the community, including Black landowners, through changing times.

In a small Texas Panhandle town, a few things have remained constant– cowboys, high school football, conservative voters, and the family-owned weekly newspaper, The Canadian Record. Publisher and editor Laurie Ezzell Brown strives to keep the town’s paper of record and her family’s legacy alive despite an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a growing mistrust for all media and her own liberal column.

There is only one doctor in rural Clay County, Georgia, one of the state’s poorest and unhealthiest counties. After several years of working without pay, she can no longer volunteer full-time and faces the possibility of closing her clinic. Committed to her community, she seeks to continue serving her patients amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, dwindling support, and broken promises.

Three community members in a rural Appalachian town experience illness after exposure to contamination from a nearby US Army Ammunition Plant. Due to the open burning of waste, the facility is considered the largest polluter in Virginia, releasing millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into the air, soil, and water each year. The film incorporates contaminants from the facility into 16mm film.

In Springdale, Arkansas, migrants from the Marshall Islands gather to commemorate the 1946 bombing of Bikini Atoll and ask the questions: Why did the United States choose their islands and what are the ongoing impacts on their indigenous Pacific Island community? “In Exile” explores the nuclear legacy of the US in the Pacific and the lingering catastrophe in its wake.

Georgetown University sold hundreds of enslaved people to stave off bankruptcy, scattering families across the South, never to see each other again. With the help of DNA databases, their descendants are reconnecting six generations later. “Finding Us” is a portrait of four descendants who are using their unique talents to regrow the family trees felled nearly two centuries ago.

Clinton Bagley revisits his first interview from Mississippi’s Washington County Oral History Program. Amongst the files, one piece of material sticks out, the catalyst for the whole program. In a conversation he recorded in 1975 with Daisy Greene, a retired school teacher from his hometown, we learn about a devastating flood, cruel systems of oppression, and the voices that define the Delta.

63 years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the surviving Cuban-American dissidents tell the fuller story. In detailed interviews with the men who fled Cuba only to return alongside US military forces, they narrate the calamity of the US siege and the trauma they faced as prisoners. By reliving the horrors of war and the fragility of service, these men fill a gap in the military record.