NEWPORT –– The public is invited to a special afternoon of movies and discussion featuring the first Newport showing of the teaser-trailer to BEHIND THE HEDGEROW: Eileen Slocum and the Meaning of Newport Society, an exclusive documentary about today’s world of aristocratic Newport, Rhode Island –– a world that traces its roots to the Vanderbilts and Astors of the Gilded Age.
The afternoon begins at 4 p.m. on Thursday, August 13, at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum, 50 Bellevue Ave., Newport. The event, which is free and open to all, will include a discussion with filmmakers David Bettencourt and G. Wayne Miller, partners in their Providence-based Eagle Peak Media production company.
BEHIND THE HEDGEROW is an exclusive inside look at the people of fortune and their descendants who have made Newport a coveted address and summer destination since the mid-1800s. Part history and part contemporary look, the movie will utilize rare footage, photographs, archives and on-camera interviews. A significant part of the film will be the story of the late Eileen Gillespie Slocum, whose family has welcomed the filmmakers into the world of their late mother, who died in 2008.
Members of the Slocum family will be on hand for the afternoon.
Also included in the program is the first Newport showing of Eagle Peak Media’s ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place, a feature-length documentary about the tuberculosis epidemic in early 1900s America and globally today. The movie has been broadcast on PBS, featured at the 2009 Rhode Island International Film Festival, and received critical acclaim from many sources since its release earlier this year.
BEHIND THE HEDGEROW will premiere in the summer of 2010. National broadcasts will follow.
For more details about the movie, visit www.BehindTheHedegerow.com Information about sponsorship opportunities is available at the site.
BEHIND THE HEDGEROW is made possible in part by grants from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. The Redwood Library has generously opened its archives to assist the in the movie, which has been in production since June.
(This is not an RIFC Production)