Appalheads

I recognized a kindred spirit in Anna Richardson White during our first conversation: we’d both grown up in Appalachia, moved away in our teenage years, and pursued careers in coastal cities antithetical to our folksy rural roots. When Anna pitched the idea of a film honoring Appalshop, a storied institution of Appalachian history and culture that her father founded in 1969, we both felt that the film should wrestle with this tension in identity.

Appalheads uses Anna’s relationship with her aging father, Bill, to make the case that the people and places that occupy our formative years leave an indelible mark on the individuals we become. But it’s up to us to make sense of these influences – to make them into a story we tell ourselves about who we are. This kind of understanding of self can be particularly tricky for those of us from regions of the country viewed through the pathology of poverty and depicted through stereotypes.

A chief source of Appalshop’s value was in helping generations of Kentuckians recontextualize their Appalachian roots, through films and other media, as a source of strength and pride. The beautiful discovery that occurred while making this film was that this very process of recontextualization was at play for Anna, on a personal level, in the shifting dynamics of her relationship with her dad. Though it may have been difficult for Anna to own the epithet “Appalhead” as a teenager, it is now symbolic of so much of the foundation she shares with her father, and with her home in Eastern Kentucky.

Time has a funny habit of shifting the ground under our feet, turning adults into children, barbs into badges of honor, and mere habits into rituals that are shorthand for a whole host of values and beliefs. I hope Appalheads makes audiences think twice about their own roots, the soil in which they’re embedded and the people who tended to it.