Living History

I never knew my dad, Andrew, who died when I was a baby. I grew up collecting stories, letters, photographs, videos, anything that might provide insight into the person he was.

My search brought me to Virginia City, a town frozen in the 19th century, where my dad lived when he was my age. I was looking for the same thing that half a million tourists seek in town each summer: a way to experience the past.

In this town, I could drink at the same saloon where my dad drank in the 1970s, have dinner at the restaurant where he’d worked, and play basketball on the same court, knowing that nothing in this place had changed since he was here. Thrilled by this newfound feeling of closeness toward my dad, I began spending more and more time in town.

As I grew closer to Virginia City’s 200 residents, I realized that many of them were dealing with similar feelings of loss and a struggle to move forward. In the face of rapid cultural change and gentrification in southwestern Montana, here was a community grappling with the difficulty of holding on to its traditions in the 21st century.

In 2023, I set out with my friend Will to document these parallel attempts to live in the past. We began working on a film that interweaves my search for my father with Virginia City’s fight against change. With the help of a filmmaking grant from the state of Montana, we spent the past two summers filming with reenactors, local historians, activists, ghost hunters, and hoarders.

Our goal was simple: use narrative storytelling to explore the connection between loss and nostalgia. While this story is personal and specific, we believe that its mission is more important than ever as America debates whether its future should look like its past.

Connection, Access, Accountability

My connection to this story is intimate and deeply personal.

I spent the summer of 2022 in Virginia City without a camera, working on my college thesis and meeting people in town, hoping to find out more about my dad and his life when he was in his 20s. The people I forged relationships with are people I care about deeply. They give me a sense of connection to my dad that I will value long after we finish making this film. These relationships, which were born out of a curiosity about a time in my dad’s life I knew little about, have developed into some of the closest relationships I have built in my adult life. I know I will continue to visit Virginia City after we complete filming and return for community screenings because of the people there.

I believe that the very personal reason I value the relationships with the subjects of the documentary has spread to Will and to everyone who has worked on the movie. We care about the people we worked with first and foremost as people, not as characters in a movie.

I hope the movie reflects something true about each and every person depicted on screen. With that said, these reflections are not devoid of nuance or a particular point of view. One person I became close with, who I bonded with over the experience of losing a father at a young age, is a reenactor who depicts a Confederate sympathizer. She expresses pro-Confederate beliefs that I do not agree with. In the film, I grapple with the ways in which this desire to live in the past can rub up against some of the darker aspects of the American psyche.

As a subject of the film myself, I have a unique perspective on the ways in which it is vulnerable to share your life with a film crew. We always strive to treat that vulnerability with love and respect.