CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The 12th annual Maupintown Film Festival is set to return to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center this weekend, starting Friday evening.

The festival will feature 17 films and one talk across three days, starting Friday evening and ending Sunday. This year its theme is “Bold and Beautiful,” with films centered around the Black community’s history of resistance against oppression and injustice, both inside and outside of Charlottesville.

The event was founded by local filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson, a native of Albemarle who describes his own work as centered around “sharing stories of African American history and culture via film.” 

He first started the festival 12 years ago at the St. John Baptist Church, his family’s church, as a way to share films that he thought people should be aware of. 12 years later, Dickerson said the festival has leaned even more in sharing films done by independent filmmakers that showcase stories most don’t hear about otherwise.

This year, Dickerson said the festival received 50-60 submissions this year, with submissions not just from Charlottesville but all over the country and even outside of it. Each carries a unique message that ties back to the central mission of the festival — highlighting overlooked history and communities.

 

“Meeting the Moment — America @250 and Our Shared American Visions”

 

The festival’s only non-film entry this year, Saturday’s schedule is set to end with a talk given by Dr. Edward Ayers and Annie Evans from New American History, an educational platform through the University of Richmond. 

Ayers is a Professor of the Humanities at UR and Evans is a former history teacher who previously served as the K12 Social Studies Curriculum Specialist for Charlottesville City Schools. Together they created New American History as a resource for educators, using various forms of media, including some of Dickerson’s films, to create learning resources for teachers across the country.

“We think documentary films, graphic novels and other forms of digital media are a great way to capture student’s attention toward teaching better history,” Evans told Cville Right Now.

That philosophy will be the focus of their talk on Saturday, where the two will discuss the value of media in getting students interested in history ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary.

“There’s a lot of ribbon-cutting photo-ops,” Evans said of the anniversary, “but what I’m concerned about is I’m not seeing a lot of people taking the opportunity to use an anniversary like this to really dig into history.”

Evans said she wants people to understand that teachers are thinking about how best to teach history using this unique anniversary, even amidst the controversies over how best to teach the subject in public schools.

Evans said she first worked with Dickerson and Maupintown while a curriculum specialist in Charlottesville. Since then, the two have collaborated on multiple occasions, with Evans stressing the importance of events like the Maupintown Film Festival helping highlight local history, especially in Charlottesville, where events like 2017’s Unite the Right Rally have left an impact. She also commended Dickerson and Maupintown for helping highlight that history.

“It’s not like this was a random act of violence,” she said. “This is something that has been building for decades, if not centuries, and when you don’t understand your own local history, then it makes it difficult to understand how we got to that point.”

 

“Count it up | The Prolyfyck Sole Systaz take on The Detroit Marathon”

 

The festival will kick off its final day on Sunday with a short documentary centered on “Prolyfyck,” a black-led run crew located in Charlottesville.

The documentary centers on seven women of color from the group nicknamed “The Sole Systaz,” who set out to run their first marathon. James Dowell, one of Prolyfyck’s co-founders and organizers, said the group’s path to the marathon started when one of its leaders, Juanika Howard, set out to run a marathon, but didn’t want to do it alone, instead gathering a group of her fellow “Systaz” to do it with her. Dowell added that the effort was entirely led by them, and not something the other leaders in the groups tried to push them to do.

“That was a goal that they wanted to set out to accomplish and they wanted to tell the story and so that’s exactly what they did,” he said.

While Howard had been involved with the making of “Who Is a Runner,” the first short documentary featuring Prolyfyck, Howard said being featured on “Count it up” was a big adjustment, as they had to be emotionally vulnerable in front of the camera during the process.

“I think us developing that sisterhood gave us the space where we could be vulnerable with one another and the camera wasn’t a big deal any longer,” she said.

Now that the film is out and being featured in festivals like Maupintown, Howard said it’s been a “different” experience for her. While she’s typically used to being in the background, stepping out as a headliner of the film has been uncomfortable at times, but also an opportunity for growth.

“It’s been an opportunity to highlight what it is that’s uncomfortable and further self-exploration for myself and being able to be like, ‘No, I can encourage other folks who don’t think of their bodies as runner, who don’t see themselves in everyday print as some who’s active, and that is okay,’” she said.

 

Finding Edna Lewis

 

The final film on the schedule centers on the life of Edna Lewis, a native of Freetown, Virginia, an unincorporated community near Orange County, who went on to become a renowned chef and early pioneer of farm-to-table cooking.

The film was directed by Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren. The married filmmakers run the production company Field Studio, which they started in Charlottesville in 2009 before relocating to Richmond. Ayers, a native of Charlottesville, grew up in a family that loved Southern cooking, and her aunt happened to own one of Lewis’ cookbooks.

After watching a segment from the show Top Chef that featured Lewis’ story and work, Ayers began to reflect on her legacy while thinking about her and her husband’s next project.

“I reflected that Edna Lewis is such an amazing Virginian,” she said, “and that hers is very much a Virginia story and that maybe Virginia hadn’t really claimed her as much as we should.”

This in combination with Orange County encouraging local restaurants to create items based on Lewis’ cooking further convinced Ayers to make the chef the subject of their next film. 

Ayers and Warren then approached Deb Freeman, a Richmond-based food writer, to host the documentary. She told the duo that their timing was impeccable, as she was about eight weeks away from hosting a dinner in honor of Lewis’ life at the Roosevelt, a local Southern restaurant in Richmond.

The dinner served as the first shoot of the film, and a few weeks later Orange County dedicated a historic state highway marker to Lewis, once again reaffirming it was the right time to make a documentary on her life.

“It just felt like this is the right time, right place and VPM was the right partner to make this story happen,” Ayers said, “and it was just a real joyful journey of discovery.”

All these films and more will be featured at the festival this weekend. Dickerson said he’s excited to see all of them, with his favorite moments every year coming from seeing the audience learn something new.

“As the movies are playing, when I can tell the audience is having one of those ‘a-ha’ moments based on something that they’ve seen or just learned or became aware of,” he said, “I think that’s one of my favorite things.”