Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait

In this new live music and film piece, acclaimed musician Jenny Scheinman invites us into the captivating visual world of H. Lee Waters, who documented over 118 small towns in the southeast between 1936-42. Waters’s films are of regular people going about their lives – mill workers streaming out of factories, a mother and daughter dancing on a dirt road, an old man reading a war-time headline, children racing in slow motion toward a huge wooden teeter totter. Scheinman and filmmaker Finn Taylor have re-edited these iconic images to Scheinman’s music, and created a new movie that speaks to any community as much as to the towns where it was filmed. “These are America’s home movies. They contain a clue to our nature, an imprint of our ancestry. They were shot before Americans had sophisticated understanding of film, and capture truthfulness that one is hard-pressed to find in this day and age now that we are immersed in a world of social media, video, and photography. These people can dance. Girls catapult each other off seesaws and teenage boys hang on each other’s arms. Toothless men play resonator guitars on street corners, and toddlers push strollers through empty fields. They remind us of our resilience and of our immense capacity for joy even in the hardest of times.” - Jenny Scheinman

Expected Guests: Director Finn Taylor, Musicians Jenny Scheinman, Robbie Fulks, and Robbie Gjersoe