Linefork
(Vic Rawlings + Jeff Silva, 96 min, USA, DCP)
Q&A w/ filmmakers Vic Rawlings and Jeff Silva
An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Now well into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A retired coal miner with black lung, Lee and his wife, Opal, continue to farm the land where he was born. Together they face encroaching health concerns and stark economic realities. Recorded over three years, Linefork is an observational film documenting their marriage, their community, their resilience, and the raw yet delicate music of an unheralded banjo legend, linked to the past yet immediately present.
“The film’s power derives from the same thing that made the first moving pictures so mesmerizing: the spectacle of life passing before your eyes, in all its tedium and strangeness, including the strangeness of life drawing to its end.” – Peter Trachtenberg, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A mesmerizing experience. Far from an exploitative voyage into an antiquated existence, what emerges is an empathetic step into the pace of everyday life in this corner of America, coloured by music.” – Mark Krefting, The Wire Magazine
