Moving Midway - A Documentary by Godfrey Cheshire

The Filmmakers

	Godfrey Cheshire (Writer, Director, Producer) is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. A native of North Carolina, he co-founded Raleigh’s Spectator Magazine and began writing film criticism professionally in 1978. After moving to New York in 1991, he served for a decade as chief film critic for New York Press; his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications. His reviews currently appear in North Carolina’s Independent Weekly, where they have won three Arts Criticism awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Cheshire’s areas of special interest include Iranian film, the conversion to digital cinema and cinematic representations of the American South. He is a former chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle and a member of the National Society of Film Critics.

	Robert Hinton (Chief Historian and Associates Producer) is Associate Director of Africana Studies at New York University. Born in Raleigh, N.C., in 1941, he grew up in the city's historically black Chavis Heights district. In 1993, he earned his Ph.D. in American History from Yale University. For his dissertation, Cotton Culture on the Tar River (published by Garland as The Politics of Agricultural Labor), he devoted extensive research to the plantation culture of central North Carolina and plantation-owning families including the Hintons; he believes that his grandfather, Dempsey Hinton, was born a slave at Midway Plantation around 1860. Dr. Hinton, who supervised all historical research for Moving Midway, lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the artist and choreographer Annie Sailer, and his daughter Phoebe.

	Jay Spain (Producer, Cinematographer) is a versatile filmmaker based in Raleigh, N.C., who runs his own production company, The Communications Group, through which he has created award-winning films, commercials, videos and media productions. In addition to producing and photographing several independent dramatic features, he made his directorial debut with Live and Let Go (2004), an acclaimed documentary about a terminally ill man’s decision to end his life. He is currently directing and producing a documentary about the life of 1957 Guggenheim Fellow, writer and clinical psychologist Lucy Daniels, titled In Her Own Voice.

	Vincent Farrell (Producer) is the founder of Iron Films, a New York-based production company. Since its inception in September 2000, Iron Films has produced films including Until the Violence Stops (by Eve Ensler from The Vagina Monologues, shown at Sundance and aired on Lifetime Television in 2004) and Fur, a narrative feature about Diane Arbus, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr. Farrell is currently Head of Production at R/GA’s Digital Studio, specializing in interactive and digital production for the advertising industry.

	Bernie Reeves (Executive Producer) operates Metro Magazine, a successful monthly city regional magazine serving the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. area. A native of North Carolina who previously founded, published and edited the weekly Spectator Magazine, Reeves has extensive experience in N.C. journalism, business and fund-raising. A well-known essayist who has won several prizes in journalism, he is also the founder of the Raleigh Spy Conference.

Ramsey Fendall (Editor) is a New York City-based editor originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. Through his work at The Edit Center, he has overseen a variety of narrative and documentary films, including Frozen River (ND/NF, 2008), An American Soldier (Sundance, 2008), The Understudy, Manhattan Kansas (SXSW, 2006), The Garage and Head Trauma. More recent work includes editing on the documentaries Hotel Gramercy Park and Ice Music. His current documentary projects include Seven Studios and Skatopia.

Greg Loser (Editor) attended The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he studied film and television. After school he worked briefly in broadcast advertising before returning home to Massachusetts to make his first short film. Since 2005, Greg has lived and worked in New York City where his projects have included documentaries, short films and music videos. In addition to his editing work, Greg created Moving Midway’s distinctive graphics, maps and animated family trees.

Ahrin Mishan (Composer) is a musician-filmmaker whose feature work as composer includes Ramin Serri’s Maryam and Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan, for which he won the Georges Delerue Grand Prize for Best Music at the 1998 Flanders International Film Festival (shared with Simon Fisher Turner). As a filmmaker, he co-directed and composed the music for the acclaimed documentary short Bui Doi: Life Like Dust. On television, he has composed for First Person (Errol Morris, director), JFK: Reckless Youth (ABC) and Fling (Paramount) as well as the recent series Whoopi! (NBC) and Ed (NBC/Viacom). A native of Los Angeles, Mishan is currently based in New York.

Algia Mae Hinton (Blues Songs by) is a noted performer whose style of Piedmont blues (referring to the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, Virginia and Georgia) has roots that conceivably thread back through plantations like the Hintons’ to Africa. Born in 1929 in Johnston County, N.C., she learned to play guitar at age nine and performed as a buckdancer and musician throughout her youth. Yet much of her life was consumed with farm work and raising seven children alone, after the early death of her husband. She made her professional debut in 1978, and went on to become a popular performer at venues ranging from folk festivals to Carnegie Hall. Her debut album, Honey Babe, was released in 1999.