In 2015, I interviewed Frances Causey for Documentarians: Our Last Refuge for the Truth. Since then I have watched Frances use her documentary Ours is The Land to fight the Rosemont Mine. (Watch the 17 minute doc here.) And Sunday I was thrilled to see her powerful documentary The Long Shadow at the Loft Film Festival.
Of all the divisions in America, none is as insidious and tenacious as racism. In this powerful documentary, director Frances Causey investigates the roots of our current racial conflicts. Causey and Long Shadow producer Sally Holst, both daughters of the South, were raised with a romanticized vision of America’s past. Causey and Holst made the film after reflecting on how haunted they are by the truth of slavery’s legacy in their own histories.
“Shadow is a gripping personalized history lesson, with Causey covering salient points, including how economics drove the despicable trading of humans. Her of-the-moment feature couldn’t be more necessary.” – Randy Myers, Mercury News
Causey and her team passionately seek the hidden truth and the untold stories that reveal how the sins of yesterday feed modern prejudice, which burns undiminished despite our seeming progress. From the moment of America’s birth, slavery was embedded in institutions, laws, and the economy, and yet even as slavery ended, racism survived like “an infection.” By telling individual stories—of free blacks in Canada; of a modern, racially motivated shooting—Causey movingly personalizes the costs and the stakes of continued inaction. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once said, and this echoes one scholar’s warning: “We’re still fighting the Civil War, and the South is winning.” (Dir. by Frances Causey, 2017, USA, 91 mins., Not Rated)
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More information about the film can be found at www.thelongshadowfilm.com
