Moving Midway
Directed by Godfrey Cheshire
at Lincoln Plaza & IFC Center, Running Time: 98 min.
Former New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire once announced the death of film. Now he has created one of his own. His first feature, Moving Midway, a digitally lensed documentary (characteristic of most indie docs these days) opened last weekend in NYC. The film focuses on his family’s Southern plantation home and the act of moving it to save it from North Carolina’s urban sprawl. Since the movie will be projected digitally at the IFC Center, Cheshire essentially has one foot in the 20th century, and one in the 21st.
“Yeah, it’s kind of ironic after, having been associated with this death of film concept for a long time, that I’m starting out bridging the two eras, the two generations,” says Cheshire. “I think it’s something that’s coming up a lot these days, and I think in a lot of different areas. For example, people talk about Obama as being of this century and McCain as being of the previous century, and I think that’s a very clear-cut difference right there. With a lot of significance in all sorts of different ways.”
NYPress: What was your vision of the film when you started working on it?
Godfrey Cheshire: This project was originally about my family and this place and the decision to move this plantation or not. But it became about the very definition of the family once we discovered during the making of the film that we had 100 African-American cousins we previously hadn’t known about. I sort of ended up building a bridge between the black side of the family and the white side that didn’t know anything about them.
The film straddles geographic regions as well, since it was shot in North Carolina and edited in New York. How did the New York indie film environment influence your approach in the making of this film?
My film was a collaborative New York/North Carolina enterprise and both sides were equally important in bringing the film to completion, but I didn’t really feel like I was directing the movie during shooting in North Carolina, which was basically a gathering of the raw materials that I wanted to have or hoped to have. The actual shaping of the film happened during the editing process in New York where I had two very good editors. They really understood it, and they could objectify this a lot more than I could because I was subjectively too close to it.
I moved to New York and began writing for New York Press in 1991, and in some ways that was a very fortuitous time because I felt like I came in with the first wave of the independent film boom that happened in the ’90s. And there was so much interest in this subject then, in downtown New York, among cinephiles, among students…also among aspiring filmmakers, actors and such that it was a real exciting time to be there and to be involved in shaping that dialogue.
But very specifically, I saw the growth of an independent industry in New York with outfits like Good Machine and various other production entities.
Although the indie industry in New York will go on, I think it’s a lot more challenging now for people than it was in the early ’90s…when there was a sense of infinite possibility. And now, I think, people are very much aware of the limitations that surround all of this. I feel lucky that I was able to observe that and then also to partake in it in a certain way in becoming an independent filmmaker myself in the later phase of everything.
When the film was originally finished, it seemed to be a lock for Sundance, and then it didn’t get in. How disappointing was the Sundance rejection?
Well we actually edited very hurriedly, over five months. And Sundance gave us an extension of a month. Getting turned down by Sundance may have been the best thing that happened to the film in that we really needed more editing. I didn’t see it at the time, but we went back in and edited another five months.
The cut that came out of that really is the definitive film, and it really would have been a shame in a way if that earlier cut had gotten into Sundance, because it would have kept us from reaching that final point that the film needed. I guess the question after that was, should we have waited for the following year to Sundance, and resubmitted for 2008? And I suppose there’s an argument for that, but I’m glad that we went ahead and got the film out there because I didn’t want to spend nine months twiddling my thumbs, waiting to see if we got into Sundance again. I was much more in favor of going ahead and beginning the film’s career at another festival.
Directed by Godfrey Cheshire
at Lincoln Plaza & IFC Center, Running Time: 98 min.
Former New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire once announced the death of film. Now he has created one of his own. His first feature, Moving Midway, a digitally lensed documentary (characteristic of most indie docs these days) opened last weekend in NYC. The film focuses on his family’s Southern plantation home and the act of moving it to save it from North Carolina’s urban sprawl. Since the movie will be projected digitally at the IFC Center, Cheshire essentially has one foot in the 20th century, and one in the 21st.
“Yeah, it’s kind of ironic after, having been associated with this death of film concept for a long time, that I’m starting out bridging the two eras, the two generations,” says Cheshire. “I think it’s something that’s coming up a lot these days, and I think in a lot of different areas. For example, people talk about Obama as being of this century and McCain as being of the previous century, and I think that’s a very clear-cut difference right there. With a lot of significance in all sorts of different ways.”
NYPress: What was your vision of the film when you started working on it?
Godfrey Cheshire: This project was originally about my family and this place and the decision to move this plantation or not. But it became about the very definition of the family once we discovered during the making of the film that we had 100 African-American cousins we previously hadn’t known about. I sort of ended up building a bridge between the black side of the family and the white side that didn’t know anything about them.
The film straddles geographic regions as well, since it was shot in North Carolina and edited in New York. How did the New York indie film environment influence your approach in the making of this film?
My film was a collaborative New York/North Carolina enterprise and both sides were equally important in bringing the film to completion, but I didn’t really feel like I was directing the movie during shooting in North Carolina, which was basically a gathering of the raw materials that I wanted to have or hoped to have. The actual shaping of the film happened during the editing process in New York where I had two very good editors. They really understood it, and they could objectify this a lot more than I could because I was subjectively too close to it.
I moved to New York and began writing for New York Press in 1991, and in some ways that was a very fortuitous time because I felt like I came in with the first wave of the independent film boom that happened in the ’90s. And there was so much interest in this subject then, in downtown New York, among cinephiles, among students…also among aspiring filmmakers, actors and such that it was a real exciting time to be there and to be involved in shaping that dialogue.
But very specifically, I saw the growth of an independent industry in New York with outfits like Good Machine and various other production entities.
Although the indie industry in New York will go on, I think it’s a lot more challenging now for people than it was in the early ’90s…when there was a sense of infinite possibility. And now, I think, people are very much aware of the limitations that surround all of this. I feel lucky that I was able to observe that and then also to partake in it in a certain way in becoming an independent filmmaker myself in the later phase of everything.
When the film was originally finished, it seemed to be a lock for Sundance, and then it didn’t get in. How disappointing was the Sundance rejection?
Well we actually edited very hurriedly, over five months. And Sundance gave us an extension of a month. Getting turned down by Sundance may have been the best thing that happened to the film in that we really needed more editing. I didn’t see it at the time, but we went back in and edited another five months.
The cut that came out of that really is the definitive film, and it really would have been a shame in a way if that earlier cut had gotten into Sundance, because it would have kept us from reaching that final point that the film needed. I guess the question after that was, should we have waited for the following year to Sundance, and resubmitted for 2008? And I suppose there’s an argument for that, but I’m glad that we went ahead and got the film out there because I didn’t want to spend nine months twiddling my thumbs, waiting to see if we got into Sundance again. I was much more in favor of going ahead and beginning the film’s career at another festival.
