Icarus Films announced this past week that the Bullfrog
Films production of documentary filmmaker Leah Mahan’s Come Hell or High Water: The
Battle for Turkey Creek will be making its DVD debut on Mar. 28.
If you watch the news on television (cable), even casually,
you begin to get the sense that if it isn’t happening in New York City, Los
Angeles or Washington D.C., then it really isn’t all that important;
meaningful. Who cares about the history
and events of those off-the-beaten-path places and locales … those country
roads and quiet hamlets. Times Square
they are not.
As the story goes, during the Christmas holidays in 2001
documentary filmmaker Leah Mahan, who had completed a film in 1996 titled Holding
Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street (a story about community
redevelopment in Roxbury, Massachusetts) — so she knew something of documentary
process — took a trip with her friend Derrick Evans (a Boston school teacher)
to his childhood home of Turkey Creek, Mississippi to record an “oral history”
of the area. It was a personal task,
simple, but what developed from that seemingly minor effort turned into this
feature-length documentary.
Why Turkey Creek? It
has an interesting history … right after the Civil War (circa 1866) emancipated
slaves purchased half of a “quarter section” (that would be 320 acres) of land
and the generations that followed live and died there; they lived off of the
land, it was their home.
Literally surrounded by the Biloxi-Gulfport multiplex,
Turkey Creek was standing in the way of progress — expansion, redevelopment and
on and on. Derrick simply wanted his
friend Leah Mahan to record some of the stories about the area — the history —
before it was lost. It became his
passion — to save and restore, not destroy, Turkey Creek.
No, this little backwater community, with a rich history, is
not Times Square, it’s not Derrick Evans
makes the case that just because you can build another strip mall doesn’t mean
that you should … Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek makes that
case quite well and it is a story worth knowing about.New post
Hollywood and Vine; you’ve likely never heard of it,
but it still matters.
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