Quick Update

Jef here.

Wrapping up post-production puts us in a reflective mood.  It's our hope is that people in and around the film feel the film touches on the truths they know and they live.  By extension, we hope it speaks to Kentuckians, small-scale family farmers, and those who live in other overlooked rural communities.  We hope we have made this film in the same spirit that its subjects make their lives and their art. 

As filmmakers, post-production is the part of the process where we are supposed to get wrapped up in whether we will be accepted into a prestigious festival or whether we might earn some sort of token of artistic recognition.  But the truth is, that's just not on our minds.  It would seem unimaginable to focus on how the project could serve some sort of ambition when it converses with a man who walked away from the culturally-prescribed arc for an aspiring "great American novelist" (i.e. When he and his family abandoned New York, the self-appointed literary capital of the US, and moved to Port Royal Kentucky. Pop. <100.) to build a real life "working the land and writing."

In Santa Clara Valley (portions of which Wendell read in our previous film The Unforeseen) Wendell writes that "the sky roared with the passage of those who had been foreseen toward destinations they foresaw, unhindered by any place between." 

In another poem, Wendell refers to them this way:

"the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened only toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from."

Most people would consider "self-actuated" a compliment, but here Wendell almost puts it on a continuum with a kind of damnation of TOTAL unawareness. Lostness to being lost. It is reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."