When Southern-born, New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire learned that his North Carolina cousin Charles Silver was going to literally uproot the family's ancestral mid-19th century plantation home called Midway and haul it to a quieter location -- far from the encroachment of real-estate developers -- Cheshire's documentary instincts kicked in. And thankfully so, because "Moving Midway," his engaging chronicle of the physical, historical and psychological effect of the undertaking, is also an invitation for a film buff to meditate on the antebellum South's mythic power in stories and film (from "Birth of a Nation" to "Roots"), and a personal genealogical inquiry that uncovers a parallel family line of slave-descendant cousins he'd never met.Synopsis of Moving Midway
One is New York University professor Robert Hinton, whose insight from the African American perspective is enriching and often funny, as when he challenges Cheshire's steel-magnolia mom at a Civil War reenactment on her love of the typically white-only spectacles, and the notion that the conflict was about states' rights more than slavery. Says a smiling Hinton to Cheshire later, "I'm perfectly happy to have them keep fighting the war, as long as they keep losing it."
In this potentially monumental election year for racial progress and demographic change in North Carolina, "Moving Midway" and its house-relocating metaphor plays its own quirky yet thoughtful part in the question of how much the South has truly moved. Wide load indeed.
New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire is visiting his family in North Carolina when his cousin Charlie Silver tells him something startling. He inherited Midway Plantation, the ancestral home of his and Cheshire's extended family. But now Charlie and his wife Dena have made a decision: They want to move Midway to a new location to escape Raleigh's encroaching sprawl. Charlie's plan provokes immediate controversy in Cheshire's tradition-minded family. For Cheshire, it brings back memories of the wild, strange and magical place Midway seemed when he was a child, and of the stories he heard there. Yet stories, Cheshire realizes, both convey and conceal. The reality of the Southern plantation was that it depended on the institution of slavery. In fact, Midway bred two sets of Hintons, one white, one black. For years, they have rarely encountered each other. But that begins to change as Cheshire sets out to chronicle Charlie's attempt to move Midway.
Director: Godfrey Cheshire
Opened September 12, 2008 Runtime:1 hr. 35 min.
Genres: Biography, Social History, Culture & Society
Showtimes for Moving Midway from Fandango.com
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