ETSU hosts South Arts film screenings

JOHNSON CITY (Feb. 4, 2021)– Family, heritage and moving forward come into focus in a variety of ways in the three spring films from South Arts Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, an annual series that East Tennessee State University has presented free of charge for more than a decade.

All films in the ETSU circuit are being streamed online again this spring, but access has been extended to make the three films each available for four full days, rather than two evenings as in fall.

The first spring independent film, “Cane Fire,” will screen Feb. 7-10; “Warrior Women” will be available March 7-10; and “Socks on Fire” can be viewed April 10-13.

The virtual screenings will be followed by a pre-recorded Q&A with the directors. To view the trailer and register for, or “pre-order,” screenings, visit www.etsu.edu/martin. Once films are unlocked, viewers will have 24 hours to finish watching their film, but all films must be finished by midnight of the last night.

Available Feb. 7-10, “Cane Fire,” a Best Feature Documentary winner at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival, is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story. 

“Cane Fire” examines the past and present of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, interweaving four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions and found footage. The unique film project merges film history with personal and political story lines. 

The documentary began as a family story, with filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon following his Kauai-based elderly great-uncle around the island, hoping to learn more about either the sugar industry that employed so many on the island, or the Kauai-set films he was a part of. 

“A secret history of labor unionization, racial discrimination and police crackdowns slowly begins to reveal itself, while a trip to another ‘Hollywood-ized’ locale – Kauai’s now-abandoned Coco Palms Hotel, once the setting for Elvis movies and other invented myths – opens up yet another history buried in the background, that of indigenous land-rights and the corporations eager to overlook them,” says Filmmaker Magazine.

“Warrior Women,” which streams March 7-10, features another indigenous family and a story of mothers and daughters fighting for Native rights in the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s. Audiences meet Madonna Thunder Hawk, an AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists' children – including her daughter Marcy Gilbert – into the “We Will Remember” Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. 

Today, with Gilbert now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for indigenous cultural values.

“Though we access our story primarily through a woman and her daughter, they are not special,” say directors Christina King and Elizabethton Castle, whose “Warrior” documentary has been named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals. “They are just another generation that refused to die.”
Survival is crucial, Gilbert says. “I want everybody to see the film – not just young Native people but also non-indigenous people,” the activist says. “We’re over here fighting for our land and fighting to live. It’s a living history. Everybody deserves to know this.”

The Southern Circuit offering for April 10-13 is “Socks on Fire,” yet another look at family history, this time through the lens of a “queer Southerner, who can be both equally protective and skeptical of the South,” says director Bo McGuire, who documents a rich cast of characters as they wage war over their mother’s Alabama estate.

“‘Socks on Fire’ is a transgenerational docudrama couched in the battle royal for my Nanny’s throne,” McGuire says. “I returned home from New York City to find that my Aunt Sharon, my favorite childhood relative, had locked her gay, drag-queen brother, my Uncle John, out of the family home. Aunt Sharon stoked a fire within me to document the place and the people I call home.”

The Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers is a program of South Arts. Southern Circuit screenings are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

To register for any of the spring streaming films, visit www.etsu.edu/martin or www.etsumartincenter.org. For additional information on the Martin Center for the Arts, call 423-439-8587.