On Nov. 20, the Plaza Arts Center reached the halfway point of its inaugural six-event Southern Circuit Film Tour with the showing of “Family Tree,” an exploration of two distinctly different Black families managing timber growth and sales on their North Carolina land.
Filmmaker Jennifer MacArthur attended, too, and following the screening, took questions from an intimate but engaged audience.
“Family Tree” first focused on sisters Nikki and Natalie Jefferies, who inherited a small tract of heavily forested land from their grandmother near Sanford, N.C.
The sisters are working hard to turn the trees into profit, but it’s tough. Their only help comes from their slow-moving, 63-year-old father, who has returned from a near lifetime of estrangement to make some hard-fought-for amends with them.
The other half of the story is represented by the Williams family of Enfield, N.C., led by father Tyrone Williams, who since 1994 has been running a successful 45-acre timber plot passed down through his family for more than a century.
He and his wife, Edna, have three sons working alongside them -Trevelyn, Tremaine, and Tyrone - which leads to the farm’s “Fourteen Acres” title, referring to the four men’s names. As Tyrone nears retirement age, he is concerned about continuing his family’s timber legacy.
Both families turn to advice from North Carolina forestry experts Sam Cook, Mavis Gragg, and Alton Perry to help ensure they can build intergenerational wealth while raising and maintaining healthy forests. Historically, a lack of knowledge about land stewardship has led many Black landowners to either sell their acreage to developers or divide it up over time into smaller parcels through wills to various family members.
MacArthur said she shot the film over nine months while recording only 21 days of on-scene footage, which she called “pretty tight for a feature-length (approximately 90 minutes) documentary film.
“We squeezed everything we could out of those 21 shoot days, and then we edited for about 10 months,” she added.
“Family Tree” debuted this past April at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. As director and executive producer, MacArthur was supported by Executive Producer Geeta Gandbhir, Producer Rupert Maconick, Editor Hannah Choe, Director of Photography and Cinematographer Rafael Roy, Cinematographer Darius Davis, and drone operator Wilson Land.
On most days of shooting, though, MacArthur said it was just her, Roy, and Davis or Land on the scene with the families.
“Really, by the end of the process, I felt like we were all sort of just looking at each other and knew through a sort of self-telepathy what to do,” she said. “It's really exciting and wonderful when you can get to that point with your team. Just feels really good.”
One particularly moving scene depicted the Jefferies sisters attending a personal counseling session with their father, trying to collectively come to grips with past transgressions, including his abandonment of the family.
“Raffi (Roy) is special in that he knows how to be in a room without you knowing he's there,” MacArthur continued. “We wouldn't have been able to get so many of those unguarded moments if people didn’t feel comfortable with him being in the room. So that’s really what made this thing work so well as it did.”
MacArthur said her goal in making the film was to “look at African-American folkways and events that are sort of tied to different times of the year.”
She cited the annual family cookout or the Thanksgiving dinner as commonplace events for people of all backgrounds.
Still, she added, “I just felt like I wanted to delve into the special sauce of Black families and how they do it. So yeah, the family piece was always powerful, and I wanted to connect and make that metaphor around healing the land and the family and taking care of the land and the family as sort of the core of the film.”
“Family Tree” is available for viewing only through the continuing Southern Circuit Film Tour. Still, MacArthur said she hopes to secure soon a distribution agreement with Netflix or a similar online-based film caster.
The Southern Circuit Film Tour will continue at The Plaza on Feb. 18, 2025, with a showing of “Home is a Hotel,” another feature-length documentary described as being filmed over five years to follow five residents relying on subsidized single-room occupancy hotels “to keep a roof over their heads and homelessness at bay.”
Admission is free.