Lora E. Smith
Welcome to my portfolio. I believe effective stories for change begin with the empowered voices of those most directly affected by the injustices we seek to transform.
Search
Deep Down: Make it Local
An Impact Video on Deep Down’s innovative approach to community engagement screenings. I co-produced this video and coordinated the exchange between KFTC member Beverly May and LVEJO members. LVEJO now hopes to bring a group of youth from Chicago to visit Beverly May in Kentucky and tour mountaintop removal sites. We learned that linking directly affected communities through screening events strengthens the movement and is an effective use of documentary film as a tool for social change.
Support provided by the NRDC and Working Films.
On February 11, 2011 I was one of twenty Kentuckians that gathered at the Kentucky state Capitol in an attempt to meet with Gov. Steve Beshear and discuss the issue of mountaintop removal mining. What followed was a 3-day occupation of the Governor’s office that gained national media attention and led to the Governor visiting Eastern Kentucky. Above you can link to the blog I created to update press and supporters about the unfolding story. I still manage our blog and our social networking outlets including a Facebook site that quickly attracted over 500 friends and is still growing.
Reel Power: Films Fueling the Energy Revolution
Reel Power is a new type of film experience founded as a collaboration between filmmakers, on-the-ground organizers and policy shapers to support the movement for a sustainable and just future. The collective includes some of the best award-winning environmental films of 2011 including Academy Award nominees, Gasland and Sun Come Up. Also included are films-in-progress that address emerging struggles and potential energy alternatives.
This is a trailer I co-produced in collaboration with the filmmakers, Working Films staff and editor Jeremy Levine that combines all 10 films. The trailer has been used as part of an online viral campaign, as online content by partner organizations, for fundraising purposes, and to introduce the film series to diverse audiences at events.
Standing Her Ground: Brenda Urias
This is a short ‘sound portrait’ I created about Brenda Urias. The Urias family currently lives beneath a mountaintop removal coal mining operation on land their family settled in 1825.
Standing her ground to fight for the family homeplace means living within two hundred feet of an active mining site and watching a familiar landscape disappear. The Urias family has had their water contaminated and their lives endangered from flash flooding and environmental toxins brought on by the mining. Most of their neighbors have sold out and moved off the creek, but Rully, Erica, Brenda and Makayla stay to fight for a place that holds the memories of their family’s existence and relationship to the land over the last 200 years.
This piece originally aired on WMMT 88.7, a community radio station at the Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY and was also featured on the Place & Memory Project. A more recent news piece I produced about Kentucky Rising aired on West Virginia Public Radio’s Inside Appalachia and can be found here.
A KFTC Virtual Flyover
Stepping onto a small plane with a grassroots leader from KFTC begins an emotional journey for many visitors to the Appalachian region. A KFTC “flyover” provides an unparalleled experience that reveals the massive scale of destruction mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining is ravaging on the Appalachian landscape.
This is a video I produced in collaboration with Appalachian Voices and Google Earth that gives you the virtual experience of a KFTC flyover. It is featured prominently on the KFTC website and has been used for legislative tours, in classrooms, and for general outreach purposes.
Cultural Work
Songs for the Mountaintop is a compilation CD I produced with a host of talented Kentucky musicians and KFTC supporters. The album and subsequent performances were used for fundraising and outreach. You can listen to tracks from the album here.
As a folklorist I am interested in traditional cultural expressions that speak to the deep roots of resistance within marginalized communities. For Appalachians resisting the worst abuses of industry, celebrated writer Anne Shelby put it best in the liner notes to this album: “We’ve a long tradition here of making our own songs when we need them.”
Racial Cleansing in America
This is an audio piece produced by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Corbin is a small town in the Appalachian foothills of Southeastern Kentucky. Once a thriving railroad hub it is best known nationally as the birthplace of Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Locally and regionally, though, it is used as shorthand for a violent racist past that still marks the area.
In 1919, a race riot occurred on the outskirts of town. African American workers, many of whom had made their way to Kentucky during the ‘Great Migration’ to work in the railroad yards, were violently forced out of town by an angry mob of white men. The riot echoed other acts of mob violence that moved up the East coast that year, riots ignited by racial and labor tensions from white GIs returning to find jobs filled by a new labor force willing to work in worse conditions for less money. Corbin is also my home town, situated in the county where my family has lived for seven generations. Still identified as a “Sundown Town,” Corbin has yet to truly confront its history.
Much of my work in graduate school focused on exploring issues of community memory within the stories told about the 1919 riot by Corbin families in the context of their homes. I worked on a project to plan a public exhibition and dialogue about the history of Corbin that was eventually shut down by local city government. My passion for social, labor, and racial justice in the South began here- confronting the censored and painful story of my birthplace.
I appear in this audio piece and collaborated with John to help him find interviews and gain access to different parts of the community. I first met John while taking his audio institute at Duke University. A podcast with photographs from the story is available on NPR’s website.
Creative Writing
I enjoy writing creative non-fiction situated within Southern landscapes and the storytelling of family and friends. I currently contribute pieces about foodways to the online magazine Zenchillada edited by celebrated Southern food writer, Ronni Lundy. You can read a piece about my experience working in sustainable agriculture on a North Carolina goat farm here. And an article on pie, feminism and female friendship in the Zenchillada Winter 2010 Issue can be found here.
