'For Memories' Sake' documentary makes Virginia premiere
The Lyric Theatre presents the Virginia premiere of "For Memories' Sake" on March 27 at 3 p.m. and March 29 at 7 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Cinema at Virginia Tech.
In this half-hour documentary, Angela Singer’s life and hobby of photography is explored through the lens of her granddaughter, filmmaker and director Ashley Maynor.
As the film investigates one Southern homemaker’s obsession with the photographic image, it asks questions about photography as a form of memory and captures a cross-generational portrait of two Southern women whose lives as image-makers have taken very different paths. While the film largely tells the story of one homemaker and photographer, Angela’s images speak, however incompletely, for the countless other women of her generation whose lives of pain, happiness, and searching in the rural South have rarely been documented.
What began by filmmaker Maynor as a modest attempt to preserve home movies by her grandmother, turned into a more than three-year investigation into the content of Singer's massive film and photo collection. With the help of a part-time intern, she scanned and digitized over 30,000 of Singer's photos. Maynor also logged much of Singer's video collection, which consists of over 150 hours of footage.
The film will be followed by a question and answer session with Virginia Tech film professors Ashley Maynor, director; and Paul Harrill, producer.
Admission is free to the public, but donations are encouraged.
Maynor is an award-winning documentarian whose films and new media works have been exhibited around the country. Maynor is also engaged with building communities through video partnerships, empowering youth and communities to tell their own stories. Maynor's creative work, outreach, and research have been supported by the Southern Humanities Media Fund, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition to teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia, Maynor has taught workshops as a video facilitator for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Project and as a guest artist in the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge’s Artists in Schools program. Locally, she is the co-founder and program director of Virginia Tech's Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop. Maynor also organizes Southwest Virginia's annual Home Movie Day celebration.
