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“A fascinating and complicated story of regional identity,” wrote New York Times film critic A. O. Scott earlier this month in praise of a North Carolina film that opened in the Big Apple earlier this month.
Although we like to think of our state as a “film friendly” place, successful homegrown productions are still rare, and unabashed praise from the New York establishment is noteworthy.
The film, Moving Midway: A Southern Plantation in Transit, is now showing in selected theaters in North Carolina. It is noteworthy for reasons other than the favorable reviews of a New York critic.
Moving Midway’s creator, Godfrey Cheshire, is well known as a writer about films, though not as a filmmaker. A Raleigh native and graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, he now lives in New York. He has earned a national reputation as a perceptive observer of films made by other people.{mosimage}
For some time, he has wanted to find a project that would give him a chance to turn his critical knowledge of the art into practice. That opportunity came when he learned that his cousin, Charles Hinton Silver, planned to move his family’s pre-Civil War plantation home away from the increasingly crowded outskirts of Raleigh to a more pastoral setting in keeping with its original setting.
Documenting the mechanical and engineering challenges of picking up a gigantic house and moving it a long distance could, by itself, make for an interesting story.
But Cheshire had more of a story in mind. He wanted to capture the family members and their memories of their experiences in the old house. He knew that some of them would have mixed feelings about detaching the house from the land and its surroundings. The Hinton family had owned and occupied this land since pre-Revolutionary times, and there were the spirits of ancestors to deal with.
The saga of the move combined with the extended Hinton family’s reactions to the house’s relocation would, thought Cheshire, make for a poignant story if he could capture it on film.
After the project was underway, something happened to make the Moving Midway story even more moving for the viewer.
t turned out that the extended Hinton family was even more extended than Cheshire first thought.
Shortly after he began work on the Moving Midway project, Cheshire ran into another Hinton in New York. Robert Hinton, also a Raleigh native, is a Yale trained historian. His grandfather had been born on the Midway Plantation — in the slave quarters. Coincidentally, Robert Hinton is a scholar of North Carolina history, focusing on the region’s transition from slave to free labor.
Other African-American Hintons appeared and became a part of the project, some tracing their ancestry to a union between a Hinton plantation owner and an enslaved cook.
By the end of the film, the various branches of the Hinton family come together at the relocated Midway Plantation house.
Today’s North Carolina is so different from that represented by the past days of the old Midway Plantation that it is sometimes tempting to minimize or disregard our history. But our future can be much better if we learn how our past influences who we are and will be.
Moving a House — Understanding Who We Are
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