Public Invited To Screening of Young Mississippi Delta Filmmakers

AUGUST 11, 2021 – SUMNER, MS

An in-person screening of a film created by high school students from the Mississippi Delta will be held Friday, Aug. 13, at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse. The screening will begin at 6 p.m., and masks are required.

The 45-minute film, An Army Rising Up, is the collective effort of 22 students who attended the Sunflower County Film Academy (SCFA) held this summer at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) in Sumner. The free workshop is part of the Find Your Voice K-12 Curriculum for the multimodal project, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, and teaches students how to make their own video projects by investigating the history of the Delta and local activists like Hamer, as it relates to their own life and experiences.

Organizers said the majority of schools in the Delta don’t offer audio/visual programs, and this workshop serves as a creative outlet for students while introducing them to career opportunities in broadcasting and Digital Arts and Media.

“The biggest jobs in Mississippi are being a truck driver, a salesperson, a nurse or a teacher. And not everybody can or wants to do those things. But these are the choices they’re led to believe they have,” said SCFA Instructor and Delta-native Robert “RJ” Fitzpatrick. “So, before they accept that. Or turn to a life of crime, we want to show them there’s another way.”

Organizers of the Academy partnered with ETIC because of their similar mission of helping students expand their creativity while learning about important historic events. Benjamin Saulsberry, Public Engagement and Museum Education Director at ETIC, said “racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth.”

“The arts are an integral and time proven mechanism that gives way to self-expression, collective thought, and healing from past and present traumas,” he said. “When looking at our history and our current social climate, young people have always been an essential and vital part of narrative building and storytelling on the local and national scale. It was an honor to host this year’s filmmaking workshop at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and it is our sincere hope that the participants of this workshop will continue on their journey of telling their stories through the art and skill of filmmaking. Tell your story; change your world.”

The first SCFA workshop was held at Gentry High School in Indianola in 2018 for the purpose of continuing Fannie Lou Hamer’s mission of expanding educational opportunities for minorities. This year, students came from Tallahatchie, Coahoma and Sunflower counties. The Find Your Voice curriculum also included two Educator’s Workshops organized by Fannie Lou Hamer historians, Drs. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis Houck, and new lesson plans about Hamer written by teachers from the Delta. Houck was the academic coordinator for this year’s workshop.

Sunflower County was targeted for the curricular pilot programs because of Hamer’s love, commitment, and dedication to helping citizens of the historically impoverished community. Hamer brought the first Head Start program to her native Sunflower County. She was a humanitarian providing food, shelter, and clothing for residents of the Mississippi Delta. She was also a voting rights activist who helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and Freedom Summer in 1964; and greatly influenced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By the time of her untimely death on March 14, 1977, from cancer and the after-effects of a vicious jailhouse beating, she had helped thousands to register to vote in Mississippi.

The two-week college-based workshop used classroom discussions to teach students about Hamer’s life and legacy, and racial equity and healing. They also had hands-on lessons learning the aesthetics of filmmaking using professional-grade production equipment sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The workshop was designed to provide students with such skills as primary source research, oral histories, and digital studies, to help them stand out as exemplary candidates for colleges and careers, while encouraging more minorities to enter the digital media production field.

“Using the camera can help to get your voice” heard, one student said after the workshop was over. “And we’d like to see more programs like this in school that let’s us be creative.”

“I learned a lot of things that I could really use if I wanted to major in [filmmaking] in college,” said Kiara Clark, who attends Thomas Edward High School in Ruleville. “It was really a blessing to get an opportunity to take a college class and I had great teachers! And the teachers made sure we knew how to do everything - whatever we needed help with.”

“The students learned skills that can land them jobs and opportunities in professional media careers, such as how to set up and conduct interviews, 3-point lighting, audio, how to frame shots and shoot b-roll, filming and editing,” said instructor, Dr. Pablo Correa, who teaches Digital Media and Communication at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Correa and Fitzpatrick were videographers for the soon to be released documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America. Other instructors for the program were filmmakers Christina Huff, Kyle Jones, and Dr. Brian Graves. Keyshaun Meeks, a 2019 Gentry High School graduate who attended the 2018 workshop, was on hand as a student intern/liaison.  

“The diversity of the workshop is really good for the Mississippi Delta,” Meeks said. “With me being born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, I’ve noticed that there are very limited career paths and opportunities here. This workshop can grow into something bigger than just a workshop. I personally benefitted from it. And me being in school, not having a clue on where to start my life…this workshop gave me those answers. I strongly believe in this workshop and where we can take it. We can definitely turn dreams into reality.”

Plans are being made for the 2022 workshop in another Delta location recruiting high school juniors and seniors from that area.

This year’s Sunflower County Film Academy was sponsored by Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA), The Phil Hardin Foundation, Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC), C Spire Foundation, HOPE Enterprises and Credit Union, Music Studio of Marin and ATMOS Energy. As well as Domino’s Pizza and Walmart Super Center in Clarksdale.

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