Culture: Exhibit A

A couple weekends ago I had the great opportunity to support one of my films at a festival deep in West Virginia, aka Motherland. This was my first time representing a film outside of the biosphere of Shepherdstown/DC. It was a great feeling to finally have my films burst outside of that bubble. Let me say however, that this place is hidden from the world. A little too well hidden.

It's been years since I road tripped through the Motherland, so it was a blast to see green mountains for a change, rather than blue humps in the distance. The sun was rising behind me for the last half of the drive, which made the fact that I had been already driving for an hour a little more enduring. You see, I needed to location scout for my web series White Rabbit and there just happened to be an abandoned insane asylum 45 minutes from the festival, along with an abandoned penitentiary a couple hours above that, so checking those locations off my scouting list made this weekend all the more important. And ten hours of exhausting scouting later, it was time to head to the fest and begin networking, which really was just shambling and groaning a bit while losing consciousness. After checking into my hotel and resisting sleep, I got myself to the fest, however I at this point resembled Bilbo in that "shit-your-pants" scene in Fellowship when he lashes out at Frodo like a crazed raccoon.

The fest was an overall success. The town reminded me of Silent Hill (and that town in Troll 2), there were tons of children running around the streets singing (they claimed it was for a fall festival, but I didn't trust it), and the attendance for the film fest was surprisingly low, but that was all right. I got to network a bit with fellow WV filmmakers, watch some alright films, and just relax for a weekend away from the lighting pace of Shepherdstown, WV.

On a serious note though, I learned about the reality of how fast WV is sinking into a pit of poverty and depression. That's not a blasting remark aimed at making fun of the state. Even though I was born and raised on the tip of the Eastern Panhandle, West Virginia is still my home state, so it was sad to see how ruined much of it is. Driving around I'd see hundreds of homes just shitty and rundown. Going to Wheeling I was told stories of the city's rapid decline and industrial shutdown- just over the last five years. Walking through the two abandoned locations I scouted I was told ghost stories from room to room, but the same tales were told, in a sense, as I was driven from town to town, city to city. I could feel the state dissolving as I saw more and more. What's worse is that this dissolve is a secret for lot's of people. We'll gripe upon gripe about mountain top removal, but what about the crumbling infrastructure of our mightiest cities? What about the villages shackled deep within the mountains abandoned from civilization? It was an interesting trip to say the least.