Nasty Conjugation

Just got back from a week in Mississippi shooting for the documentary. Here’s the treatment I wrote for it!

This week I met a man with pancreatic cancer. He has a bullet lodged in the back of his head, delivered by a Klansmen’s submachine gun in 1963. I sat down in his house, on his couch, and he taught me about using love as a weapon. I also met a woman, a grandmother, a teacher, who laughed as she told me about the death threats she received for letting voter registration workers sleep on the floor of her living room. I met a Methodist minister who was accused of helping to plot the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson.

These people, native Mississippians, were members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and it’s their story I’ve come to the Magnolia State to piece together. It’s a story that transcends the Sixties, the South, and all the trappings we’ve come to associate with them. As Reverend Ed King reminded me, it’s a story that is spun out time and again in history: a people’s movement taking on an entrenched power structure, an ideology that collapses under the weight of its expectations. In the state of Mississippi, black citizens stood up for the radical notion that they deserved the same rights as everyone else, and when they took their fight to the national stage they were sent home with nothing.

In filming this story, we are following the same ethos established by the MFDP in 1964. We work with what we have. We capture these people and their situations as we find them. Lighting, audio, and camera work are kept as simple and transparent as possible. Music is added, not to evoke a sense of time or place, but to evoke the emotions associated with self-discovery, with speaking truth to power, with fighting against terrifying odds.

The content of these people’s lives is key. I hear time and again that they haven’t shared their stories for fear of bragging, of beating their chests and proclaiming their feats, of letting their own deeds overshadow the idea of a unified people demanding their rights. But now they are passing on. Jimmy Travis has cancer. Ed King has had a heart attack. Unita Blackwell has Alzheimer’s. We need to find these stories, preserve them, before they disappear. Freedom doesn’t need a figurehead, or a theme song, or a movement, or permission: every great movement started with people who looked around, got to work, and never stopped to worry about who would remember them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Entropy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.