My path to filmmaking began in 2004 with the London Documentary Filmmakers’ Workshop in Kotla, Poland. My experiences documenting the life of a small Polish village, and the responsibility I felt preserving a place so beautiful and a way of life so threatened, was strong enough to make me abandon my PhD studies for an ever uncertain career in filmmaking.

Two years later, I found myself in Temple University’s Film and Media Arts Program, and working as video facilitator for Scribe Video Center‘s “Precious Places”–a community video project dedicated to documenting the “precious” and often endangered neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As part of this project, I spent most of 2006 working with the Yorktown Community Organization in North Philadelphia. Over 10 months, I taught members of the community, many of them middle-aged or senior citizens, to conceive and shoot a short documentary about their neighborhood, which we edited together throughout the fall semester. Working with Yorktown while a Temple student was especially appropriate in light of the threat Temple University housing poses to the survival of the Yorktown neighborhood.

After a well-attended premiere at Philadelphia’s I-House in February, our video, “Yorktown: You Are Here,” was chosen for a special screening at the Philadelphia Film Festival of select Precious Places projects that were created over the Scribe program’s three year tenure. Though the experience was, at times, daunting and frustrating, I found myself forever connected to a Philadelphia community I would have otherwise called a ghetto; I made friends in an area of the city I would have otherwise never dared to enter. With this small film, I became a part of something much bigger than myself.

Now, another year down the road, my journey has come full-circle: I have returned to the American South, not terribly far from where I grew up, and I am directing a community video project of my own making: Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop. While I never thought I’d voluntarily sign-up to entertain twenty middle schoolers at 9:30 each morning for two weeks, the experience so far has been amazing. In just three days, I’ve seen teens and “‘tweens’” go from making comments like, “Documentaries aren’t movies,” to telling me that my taped interview subject should have been “framed with more headroom.” They are hyper, brutally honest, and, like me, willing to see the stories in the life of their small community.

It’s hard to talk about Blacksburg these days without a mention of the events of April 16, 2007. Though I’ve only been working at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre since December of 2006, by that time I had already been warmly welcomed into the community. On that day, my theatre lost three volunteers in the shootings, and my partner lost one of his colleagues. I dare say not a single person who lives, works, or studies in Blacksburg was untouched.

Though I began planning and writing grants for Blacksburg Stories well before April, I believe now, more than ever, in this project’s mission. If we can, as Paul Harrill likes to say, convince children that ‘the world is interesting enough,’ then maybe we can create an audience for films that don’t rely on violence, special effects, or multi-million dollar budgets for their entertainment value. Maybe one day small stories will be enough.