 HOME | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | PAST ISSUES | ADVERTISING RATES | RACK LOCATIONS A brief Q and A with filmmaker Macky Alston by Debbie Meyer When I was 23, I dropped out of seminary -- my family business was the ministry -- and decided to be an artist. While selling art on the streets, I got a production assistant job for a documentary. The film was called SOMETHING WITHIN ME and was about how the arts brought kids in the South Bronx to life. That film brought me to life and to the work that has given my life its greatest satisfaction. You began digging into your past as a young adult living in Durham, North Carolina. What precipitated this search? Like many people, I have lived in the shadow of my family history. Our family homeplace where cousins gather to this day is a plantation. I have run into African American Alstons regularly for as long as I can remember. And all my life, I have gotten silent signals from my parents and grandparents, when in the presence of Black Alstons, to never bring up the history that binds our stories together. I have come to believe that not talking about something is potentially more dangerous, corrosive, and crippling than dealing with facts out in the open and building relationships in the light of truth, rather than in denial of it. As a gay man, that has been my experience, and in so many other aspects of my experience. How long (give me approximate dates if you can) did it take you to make Family Name? It took five years. We started in 1992 and completed it in 1997, just days before is premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. You were the filmmaker of Family Name but you are also part of its story since what you discovered is your personal history. How did making the film change your views of yourself, your life? My immediate family moved to New Jersey from North Carolina when I was 8. Though a child of the South, I was reared from then on up north. As I grew up, I began to avoid my Southern family and story. I didn’t know how to integrate the painful parts of my history into my understanding of who I was. I visited my grandparents less. I turned my back on a huge part of who I was. Making Family Name gave me back my roots and my family, the twisted, gnarly parts as well as the strong and beautiful parts. Except for one grandparent who had already passed, it was my path back to the people who loved me into being, even though they were not perfect, just as we are not today. The film also made me grow up, recognizing that people are capable of living in community in spite of the evil we have done to one another, but it only really works when that evil is named, owned, and taken responsibility for. As people leave after viewing Family Name, what do you hope they will remember about the film? The silences -- the ways in which people say one thing, but their body language and silences say something else. Also, the courage and grace of human beings in face of atrocity to try to love one another still. What did you have to leave on the cutting room floor that you wish you could have left in? There was an incredible sequence between a white woman, an Alston, and her black butler. She claimed him to be family, while he set the table and served her and her guests at dinner. After dinner and out of her presence, the butler stated in no uncertain terms that his family lived in a very different part of town and that the economic system controlled by white people, built on the backs of black “family members,” either had to come to an end shortly or things were going to get ugly. Tell me a little about the Sundance award. Has the film received other honors? The film received the Sundance Freedom of Expression Award, given to the best film of the year addressing a pressing social concern. It went on to receive a host of festival and industry awards, which was an unbelievable gift to a young filmmaker setting out on the path to make art for a living -- a difficult road even in the best of times. Feel free to include anything else you’d like readers to know about Family Name or yourself including other films you have made or are in the midst of making though if you do have a website this might suffice to direct people towards. Please check out my five films, including my current project THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, about the first openly gay bishop on Christendom, the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire at www.mackyalston.com. Trying to live life in the light of truth, with a sense of humility and humor, always recognizing that we fall far short of our goals, is a theme in the movies I have made. Another is the challenge of dealing with the bad things we have done and that have been done to us in our lives. It never cease to amaze me, how resilient and resourceful the human is -- thank God. Deborah R. Meyer is a Chatham writer. She can be reached a 942.3252. |