History is happening now at the Virginia Historical Society. The organization has just unveiled a new documentary called Virginia Voices, it’s the first state-specific, crowd-sourced film of its kind, and it’s making a debut in Roanoke Saturday, May 2.
To discover these Virginia Voices, filmmakers put out a call for submissions—they wanted to hear Virginians talk about their lives. Producer Jeff Boedeker says they loaned and mailed out camera packages around the state so individuals could tell their stories their own way.
“It’s all woven together in kind of a tapestry where the amateur footage, sometimes it’s very raw, sometimes very personal, but we make that digestible by seamlessly having higher end professionally shot segments as well. What’s lacking for many the quality of what the person is seeing in these crowd-source segments, it’s made up for in just the story itself.”
They had more than 200 submissions to work with, so not all made it into the final 40-minute documentary. But there’s a second component to the project, part of the Historical Society's Story of VirginiaCampaign— aninteractive website where you can search for videos geographically.
“It ranges from a 4-hour long interview with a World War II veteran in Charlottesville who stormed the beaches of Normandy to random uploads of a person who doesn’t want to show their face who is just doing a motorcycle ride through all of Shenandoah Valley. So it’s kind of anything goes, however they want to represent their life," says Boedeker.
The film officially opens in July, where it will screen daily at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.
It also hits the road— with premiers like the one Saturday, May 2 at Roanoke’s Grandin Theatre. It’s a free showing, part of a weekend film festival. Boedeker and the Historical Society's Lizzie Oglesby will be on hand for a discussion following the film.
