The Southern Culture Movie Series, sponsored by the UNC Writing Center, continues on July 7th with a screening of the 2008 documentary Moving Midway.
Here’s how the film’s website describes it:
“When New York film critic Godfrey Cheshire returns home to North Carolina in early 2004 and hears that his cousin Charlie Silver plans to uproot and move the buildings of Midway Plantation, their family’s ancestral home, an extraordinary, emotional journey begins…. Cheshire and Dr. Hinton examine how the Southern plantation, a crucial economic institution in early America, generated a powerful, bitterly contested mythology that was at the center of a string of American cultural milestones, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind and Roots. After the old manor house and outbuildings reach their new foundations, Cheshire makes contact with the some of the African American cousins whose existence he had never suspected. Their interest in the past they share with Cheshire’s relatives means that, by the time of its reopening, Midway’s ‘family’ has been forever redefined, its past illumined in ways that cast a new light on the South’s (and America’s) status as a mixed-race society.”
This film, which will be screened in 116 Murphey Hall, is free and open to the public.