Swamp Cabbage: a dark and sweaty documentary trailer (http://vimeo.com/5391303)
About the Film:
Hayley Downs grew up in rural Central Florida. Not the Disney World Florida or the Florida where your grandparents moved when they retired. It's the Florida you don't send postcards from. In Hayley's Florida there is wild boar hunting and gun toting and hard drinking and Swamp Cabbage.
One-part diary film, one-part cooking show and one-part environmental adventure, Swamp Cabbage is both an entertaining character-driven drama and a metaphor for the need to restore balance in a world gutted by the disappearing human connection to the land and food chain.
Swamp Cabbage will be made from an assemblage of Panasonic DVX 100B footage, archival materials, and Hayley's own obsessive library of personal video, super-8, animation and family photographs. The film will weave scenes of old timey and contemporary crackers including wild boar hunters, frog giggers and cattle women, with footage of Hayley's own life as a cracker who left home as a teenager, as well as flashbacks of harrowing childhood memories of alligators, snakes and serial killers on the news and Florida-centric phenomenon including giant sinkholes swallowing homes, the Challenger disaster and the bitterness of Walt Disney's gleeful colonization of Hayley's world.
The filmmakers have been collecting footage of the Florida crackers since 1999, when Hayley's father, a Florida cracker and beloved member of her small hometown, was diagnosed with an untreatable cancer. The news eclipsed everything Hayley thought was important and yanked her out of a wild, hard-partying life in Brooklyn and back to Florida to help care for him.
In the last months of his life she picked up a camera and endeavored to make sense of the world by filming. She began obsessively filming herself and her family, capturing the remarkable and devastating events leading up to and following her father's death in 2000 including: her divorce from the Cuban boy she married when she was 23, his affair with her close friend and the realization that they were moving in together, her courtship with the Brooklyn Jewish cellist who would change her life, their engagement, his diagnosis of cancer at age 34, the health insurance debacle that would lead to financial disaster, his remission, their marriage, his second and more serious diagnosis of cancer –- all before her 35th birthday.
Throughout it all, Hayley travels the corridor between Brooklyn and Florida, seeking answers and finding humor, wisdom, and kinship on the rivers, in the orange groves, in the pasture land and on back porches throughout Florida. Through Hayley's tragicomic story of loss and disconnection, we are led back to the Florida crackers – and the possibility of redemption.
Swamp Cabbage is not an easy story of good and evil with uncomplicated characters. Florida crackers, though dependent on the land, do not abide by popular notions of environmental friendliness. They resided in Florida long before statewide governance and the inception of the first national park in 1872, and in the 1940s took up arms against federal marshals to fight the fence laws which signaled the closing of the frontier. Hayley's own grandfather tells stories of helping "Totch" Adams, a famous Florida cracker, with his work poaching alligators from the swamps of the Everglades National Park – a crime he was forced to commit in order to simply feed his family.
Even the title of the film is a nod to this conflict – harvesting a sabal palm for a batch of swamp cabbage results in the death of the tree and is now illegal on public land. Sabal palms used to grow like weeds but now are scarce and vulnerable to a newly invasive palm disease. Yet Florida wildlife does not suffer from hunting – or even poaching – but from loss of habitat. The possibility of rescue lies in reclaiming some of it. Perhaps a greater commitment to conservation and community lies in an awareness of the vitality and complexity of local traditions and microcultures. Swamp Cabbage is not a political indictment of developers and Florida congressmen, nor is it a historical film about an invisible subculture. Rather it's an exploration of our complex relationship to the natural world through culture, food and where we lay our head.
In Swamp Cabbage, food and community are the remedy for the hardships of vanishing culture, compromised health, toxic relationships, and loss of human connection to the land. The less people care to understand and participate in the process of harvesting and cooking food, the farther they are from its origins and the easier it is to destroy. In the film, fifth and sixth generation crackers open their homes and their hunt camps – sharing family histories, personal stories, and savory recipes. A St. John's River fishing guide shows the effects of the more hazardous practices of the Army Corp of Engineers. Tried and true recipes such as venison, fried cooter (soft shell turtle), and fresh water bass are shared with the help of tongue-in-cheek product placement sponsorships from local food producers like Anson Mills Grits and Dixie Lily Corn Meal.
Swamp Cabbage seeks not only to tell Hayley's personal story, explore Cracker culture, challenge stereotypes of the old south, and examine encroaching development in Central Florida, but also to bridge rural/urban divides and create opportunities for diverse groups to engage in deep discussion, find unexpected common ground, organize around conservation policies, confront development issues, share recipes, break bread and ultimately to address the growing global effects of our loss of connection to the land, the animals to food sources to community – and to ourselves. Hayley's story is the story of Florida and the story of Florida is the story of us all.
http://swampcabbagemovie.blogspot.com/ (http://swampcabbagemovie.blogspot.com/)