Since our country's inception, there has been a palpable divide between Urban and Rural America. The time Sally spent in Tennessee growing up contrasted with her experience making films in the region as an adult has sharpened her sensitivity to both insider and outsider gazes on Appalachia, and ignited her passion for telling the tragic, comedic, and poignant story of hillbilly.Īppalachia is no stranger to the complexity of media representation. Deep Down was nominated for an Emmy Award for its outreach component, the Virtual Mine, and broadcast nationally on PBS' Independent Lens. As a young filmmaker, Sally associate produced David Sutherland's Country Boys, a Frontline film about two teenage boys growing up in eastern Kentucky, and then made her own film (with Jen Gilomen), Deep Down, about mountaintop-removal coal mining in a small eastern Kentucky town. Sally's mother was raised in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee, and Sally spent substantial time growing up visiting relatives, scattered throughout the Tennessee and North Carolinian Appalachian mountains. She is inspired by a rich collection of feminist filmmakers who have made socially provocative films such as Anne Lewis' Fast Food Women (1991) and Barbara Kopple's Academy-Award winning documentary, Harlan County USA (1976) - two films which inspired her to make documentaries. She is motivated by innovative approaches to storytelling, and by the desire to give voice to people who have been underserved, unheard, or misrepresented. Her work has taken her from America's prisons to its Native American reservations and seeks to build on the long history of non-fiction work that addresses significant social challenges of our time, focusing in on the Appalachian region and the experiences of women and girls and the queer community. The documentary deconstructs mainstream representations while asking crucial questions: Where did the hillbilly archetype come from and why has it endured on-screen for more than a hundred years? How does it relate to the exploitation of the land and people who live there? How do Appalachian and rural people view themselves as a result of these negative portrayals, and what is the impact on the rest of America?Īs Appalachian-American filmmakers, we committed to making this film in order to offer the world a rich and varied point of view of this historically misunderstood region.Īshley is a trained journalist and filmmaker who is guided by a feminist approach. It introduces audiences to a nuanced, authentic Appalachia that is quite conscious of how it has been portrayed and the impacts of those portrayals. Featuring bell hooks, Ronny Cox and Billy Redden from Deliverance, director Michael Apted, activists and writers Frank X Walker, Crystal Good, and Silas House, and musicians Sam Gleaves and Amythyst Kiah, hillbilly arrives at a crucial moment, confronting depictions of Appalachian and other rural people on a broad, national level.
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