Hickory native's 1st feature movie will premiere at Carolina theatre Friday
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer
HICKORY – Inside the Carolina Theatre, all 10,000 feet of Sidney King's first feature film sits on the large reel in the cinema's projection room.
"This is a very pretty sight," 29-year-old King said, eyeing the spool holding more than five years of his work. "You go through so much trouble to shoot on film, and here it is."
Outside the theater, a giant movie poster hangs near the glass doors advertising the Friday premiere. Above that, the marquee boasts King's name, welcoming the hometown filmmaker and boasting his film's title - "Pearl Diver," which King wrote and directed.
"It's really magical to be in a big theater when the lights go down and your film comes up," he said. "This is how you want people to see it. On the big screen."
The movie tells the story of two very different Mennonite sisters haunted by the memory of their mother's murder 20 years earlier. Marian, the eldest, stayed in the religious farming community where she grew up, married and had a child. Hannah, the younger sister, moved to Chicago, adopted more secular views and became a writer.
When Marian's daughter, 6-year-old Rebecca, is severely injured in a farming accident, Hannah returns to her Goshen, Ind., home to help her sister and is reminded of the tragedy that marked their own childhoods.
The film has secured nods of approval at numerous film festivals, including one of the top awards at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis and the Winnipeg International Film Festival.
Now King is bringing the film to Hickory, a community he likens to Goshen, and hopes residents of his hometown will be moved by the story and what he calls "old school" filmmaking.
"It kind of captures the pace and the way of life in a small town," he said. "(It's not) the MTV style, bombarding your senses with 1,000 images a minute."
The slower pace, King said, allows the audience to see the rural farming community not just as a locale but as its own character. "It's a specific town and a specific place," he said. "Even though Western Carolina and Indiana are very different it's a place people are proud to be from."
King started piecing the story together in the late 1990s, when he was a student at Goshen College, a Mennonite university in Indiana. King, himself, is a Mennonite.
He put the project to the side while he finished school and focused on his first film, a documentary about a Goshen College student who disappeared in Russia in 1920.
But it wasn't until his father, Hickory doctor Harry King, died in a 2001 plane crash a few weeks before the documentary's premiere that King really started thinking about his goals as a filmmaker. He wrote the film in the months that followed his father's death.
"That's when I got serious about it," he said. "Nothing in ("Pearl Diver" is specifically) based on my father, but really, all of it is. I was trying to create something positive."
Carolina Theatre co-owner Billy Ray Teague has known King's family for years and said he thought premiering the movie at the theater would be a good way to bring a local filmmaker's art to his neighbors.
"We're kind of a hometown theater, and with him being from Hickory we're able to show what local people can accomplish," he said.
Teague said the theater will show "Pearl Diver" for at least two weeks, and possibly longer if there's the demand. While comedies and blockbusters tend to pull larger crowds, Teague said he's hoping for a large turnout and is confident King's film will draw "the independent film crowd you rarely see in Hickory."
"This is a thinking film," Teague said.
An astute observer of "Pearl Diver," King said, will notice a few local faces in some of the scenes and recognize some names in the credits, as well.
King's brother, Bradley, and his new sister-in-law, Martha, gave up their honeymoon to work 12 hours a day on the set during filming in 2004; his sister made a cameo as a doctor and his mother woke up at 5 a.m. to brew coffee for the crew.
"You can always tell a true independent film when you see the director's mom in the credits," King said.
King financed the film himself and depended on friends to help on the crew and donate money or equipment. "How does the saying go, `I had to beg, borrow and steal,' " he said.
Keith Yoder of Hickory helped by driving a camera from Wilmington to Indiana, Chris Disher worked on the crew, attorney Ellie Bradshaw provided some legal aid and cinematographer John Raton of Morganton won a film festival award.
"It's fun to show it to a crowd like this because people here will recognize (names)," King said. "It's exciting to show it for a smaller audience, knowing they have that personal commitment."
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