Of Time, and the Town

Of Time, and the Town poetically depicts twenty years of changes and constants in the built environment of Farmville, Virginia and in the rural areas surrounding it. The film’s evocative super-8 film imagery documents children growing as one-hundred-year-old oak trees come down. A young couple labors to renovate an abandoned 19th century school and make it a home while the town’s previously shuttered all-Black high school finds new life as a civil rights museum documenting the 1950s student strike that helped integrate the county’s schools. Excerpts from the town’s AM radio station provide an intimate sonic complement to images of the town’s social and geographical evolution.