Moving midway

Streaming video - 2014

The past is not dead. It's not even past - William Faulkner. Humorous, poignant, probing and suspenseful, Moving midway follows a real-life family commotion that swirls around one of America's most contested and controversial icons: the Southern plantation. New York film critic-turned-filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire returns home to North Carolina and finds that his cousin Charlie Silver proposes to uproot and relocate the family ancestral home, Midway Plantation, to escape urban sprawl. Cheshire also comes across history professor Robert Hinton, who reveals that his grandfather was born a slave at Midway. As Cheshire and Hinton explore the plantation mythology embodied in our cultural history, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Gone with t...he Wind to Roots, Charlie meanwhile follows through on the Herculean feat of hoisting Midway several miles across a forbidding landscape. But this event's drama leads to an even more startling surprise: the discovery of 100 African-American cousins that Cheshire and Silver never suspected, potent proof of America's long buried but increasingly important status as a mixed-race society. more