This week, in the 1920s, Oscar Micheaux was an entrepreneur filmmaker in western Virginia. He became a world-renowned director and producer. Also, Kentucky’s poet laureate lives down the road from what has been called the country’s most lethal cryptid. Attempts to spot it have led to deaths. And, we talk soul food with Xavier Oglesby, who’s passing on generations of kitchen wisdom to his niece.
‘We’re Going To Do It No Matter What’: Appalachian Queer Film Festival Is Back, With Plans To Stay
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When civil rights attorney-turned-filmmaker Jon Matthews agreed to start a film festival with his friend Tim Ward, Matthews said the title alone was the selling point.
“He’s like, ‘It’s Appalachian Queer Film Festival,’” Matthews said. “I’m, like, ‘Done. You’ve got me. Sold.’ … I never heard anything like those two words in the same sentence before, ‘Appalachian and queer.’”
He recalled the festival’s origin story from the Floralee Hark Cohen Theater, an intimate room underneath the Taylor Books coffee shop in downtown Charleston, where the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival (AQFF) took place last weekend.
Matthews and Ward, who live in Los Angeles and New York respectively, are both West Virginia natives. Several of the films they chose to show this year involved directors from and stories set in Appalachia, or rural America.
“We want to bring good film here, but we also like to bring people from out of state here to show them like, ‘Hey, we don’t meet all the stereotypes that you might have in your head,’” Matthews said. “We’re much more open minded … And we love good cinema.”
The first AQFF took place in 2015, at the Lewis Theater in Lewisburg, Greenbrier County. The two curators had secured a grant from the Greenbrier County Community Foundation, which had received $6,700 to help with the festival, from the West Virginia Humanities Council.
The AQFF received honorable mentions from national news outlets, including Vice and the Huffington Post.
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“To The Stars,” directed by Ashland, Kentucky, native Martha Stephens, was the first film of the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival at the Floralee Hark Cohen Theater in Charleston.
In 2016, Matthews and Ward’s work was acknowledged by a different type of publication — a study on wasteful spending in West Virginia by the Cardinal Institute, a conservative lobbying group funded by the Koch Brothers.
The report, “Wild and Wasteful West Virginia,” said the festival was using state dollars to show films that “many taxpayers would find objectionable.”
Among its list of wasteful spending in festivals, the study also called attention to grants supporting the West Virginia Strawberry Festival, the State Fair of West Virginia and the Mountain State Forest Festival.
The West Virginia Humanities Council decided against rewarding the AQFF a second grant in 2016. According to Erin Riebe, grants administrator for the West Virginia Humanities Council, the decision had nothing to do with the study.
Rather, Riebe said, the AQFF’s second application didn’t meet the council’s requirements for humanities content.
“A small festival like that, you know, it kind of really hurts,” Matthews said. “So, we took a hiatus because of that grant being taken away, and really regrouped after that. We’ve taken this time to kind of find our legs again.”
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
After viewing “To The Stars” during the first night of the 2019 Appalachian Queer Film Festival in Charleston, viewers got to ask Director Martha Stephens, an Ashland, Kentucky, native about the movie.
Today, the AQFF receives support from local nonprofits, businesses and the West Virginia International Film Festival. Regardless of this year’s turnout and cost, Matthews said he’s looking forward to having an Appalachian Queer Film Festival next year, and for years to come.
“We’re going to do it no matter what,” Matthews said. “Even if just two people show up, we’re still going to do it, because we feel like this is important. So many people come up to us, and say the fact that this thing exists is important to them. They’re like, ‘I had trouble even saying who I was, and now there’s a film festival that represents that, and it kind of carries that banner for me.’”
We listen to an excerpt from the latest Inside Appalachia and learn about the influence and contributions of Oscar Micheaux, an African American filmmaker who lived in Virginia in the 1920s and shattered stereotypes.
A West Virginia cabinetmaker describes his journey to becoming an accomplished poet. Also, state lawmakers have taken an important step to funding the state’s EMS. And, the Trump administration announced it would roll back a rule on power plant emissions of mercury.
Connie Jordan Green has been writing most of her life. We talk with her about her poems and growing up in a secret city in Tennessee – Oak Ridge. Also, House Finance approved a budget for consideration of the full chamber. And, under a bill passed by Senate Health, pregnant women could have access to a prescription that might reverse the effects of abortion medication in time to save their pregnancies.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah released "Still + Bright" last year, which featured guests like S.G. Goodman and Billy Strings. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams spoke with Kiah from her home in Johnson City, Tennessee at that time. We listen to an encore of that conversation.
