'Fall River' documentary screening at RI film festival

“Fall River,” a documentary by city native Pat Heywood, will make its local screen debut across state lines at the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival this Tuesday.

The seven-minute documentary is told through Heywood’s grandmother, Margaret “Peg” Vendituoli, who can be heard in the background of the documentary talking about the city and her own personal experiences. As described on the film festival website: “Through the intimate reflections of one extraordinary woman, Fall River tells the story of a family's tragedy, the once-thriving city they inhabited, and how hope can blossom in unexpected places. In the search for closeness, for comfort, for history — what does it mean to be from somewhere?”

In a recent phone interview, Heywood, a filmmaker living in Brooklyn now, said he was shocked to learn the documentary was selected for the Rhode Island Film Festival as well as the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, which runs Aug. 23 to 26 in Middlebury, Vermont.

Heywood was born in 1991 and lived in Fall River until he was 11. When his mother passed away in 2002, he moved to Swansea to live with his grandmother, who raised him. Heywood graduated from Joseph Case High School in 2009 and headed to Emerson College to study film.

The seeds of the documentary started a few years back, he said, when he saw a USA Today report classifying Fall River as one of the worst places to live. “I had a visceral reaction to it,” said Heywood. “It was strange to see a place I had history with in a statistical, clinical way. … I know wonderful people in Fall River; my grandmother came from Fall River.”

Heywood and co-director Jamil McGinnis set out to document the city objectively as they saw it in an intensive weekend of shooting footage as they roamed around the city last August. Heywood, a native of the area looked at it with the eyes of someone returning to the area, and McGinnis, raised in Germany, had a fresh take. Working on a tight budget and calling in some favors from friends in the film industry, they shot footage that would make its way into the film.

Heywood said he always envisioned his grandmother narrating the documentary, but it took a more personal turn he hadn’t planned on when he started out. In a recorded phone conversation, her recollections turned to personal experiences. She also told him about some VHS tapes he didn’t know existed of home movies of him as an infant with his mother.

The documentary evolved into more of a personal story and Heywood decided to intersperse the footage they shot in the city with cuts from the home movies. “I wanted people to come away from it thinking there’s no black and white, it’s always grey.”

Ultimately, he said, the documentary is more of a home movie, shot on 16 millimeter film documenting his grandmother’s extraordinarily difficult life, which gets more hopeful as the story progresses. “That’s the Fall River I wanted to show. A place is never just good or bad and being able to see the grey areas of life. So, in short, I'd say that, although the framing of the film is Fall River the location, the film is really more of a personal exploration rather than journalism,” he said.

“Fall River” will be screened at the Providence Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, Aug. 7, on the opening night of the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival. For tickets and more information about the screening on Aug. 7, visit http://prog.tsharp.xyz/en/riiff/36.

“Fall River” will also be screened at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, which runs Aug. 23 to 26 in Middlebury, Vermont. For details about that festival, visit middfilmfest.org.