But we’re about the same age, and the films we make are art pieces, not just journalistic pieces. He was quite wary of that in the beginning. It’s a bit of an extractive relationship. A lot of people have come into Youngstown, a lot of media coverage, especially outsiders, they come in, see what’s there and take their stories. “Initially, it was difficult to convince him. “We followed him for a long weekend,” she said. Sait also had dreams of turning The Hub downtown into a diner and artist enclave. Sicotte-Levesque and director of photography Katerine Giguere came to Youngstown in 2013, and one of the first people they met was Sait, a musician and recovering addict who supported himself by salvaging the history among the debris in the homes of Youngstown’s decaying neighborhoods and selling those items at Greyland on West Boardman Street. “He called me up and said, ‘You have to come here and make a film,'” she said. to chronicle cultural and political shifts within the white working class. She was struck by the poverty and class divides she found in some of the communities she visited.Īround the same time, Justin Gest, a friend of hers and an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University, was working on his book “The New Minority,” which used Youngstown in the U.S. Sicotte-Levesque, founder of Journalists for Human Rights and a documentarian whose previous films took her to Sudan and Ghana, canvassed for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and spent a lot of time in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The journey to that Youngstown premiere started a decade ago. It’s the one place, ‘Oh, I hope it goes well and the people are really excited to see it.'” It’s such a privilege to show it in Youngstown. If they feel it’s honest, if they feel it represents them and they identify with it, that’s really great. It’s what the people of Youngstown think about it.
“It doesn’t matter what the greatest film critic thinks of the film. “How Youngstown perceives it is probably the most important thing,” Sicotte-Levesque said. The movie already has won awards at a couple of film festivals, but “Greyland” will get its local premiere Tuesday at the Westside Bowl in Youngstown.
We were privileged to have that relationship.”
You have to step out, pause, ‘How is this going to work?,’ but I never gave up and neither did our production company, and we got really attached to Youngstown and the way Rocco and Amber let us into their lives. “When you make a film over six, seven years, things evolve. “It was not an easy film to make,” Sicotte-Levesque said during a telephone interview. What starts as the story of two young people, Rocco Sait and Amber Beall, working to change their community for the better evolves into a tale of the economic obstacles and institutional status that prevent any real progress. “Greyland” definitely isn’t the movie Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque envisioned. But a true documentary doesn’t have a script, and anyone shooting a movie over seven years is going to encounter some unexpected twists and detours along the way.
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