From the "People" Archives:

by Anthony Kaufman

Macky Alston asked himself, "What will happen if I go looking for an African American Alston?" The answer is his feature length film, "Family Name", a first person documentary about his search for the blood that binds the African American Alstons of the South and the white slave owning Alstons of his own heritage. A powerful and personal investigation into the secrets of fear, race and sexuality, the film has garnered more praise than the perky, passionate and gay director could have imagined, winning the Freedom of Expression award at last year's Sundance and the upcoming Gotham Award from the IFP.

Shot on 16mm, edited on Steenbecks and made over a 3 year period, the film was a labor of love. It is being distributed through their own efforts and is closing its debut week run at New York's Film Forum today. Future screenings include Los Angeles, Seattle, Winston-Salem, and, if things continue as they have been, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Indianapolis, Portland, Philadelphia, Atlanta.... -- not bad for a film without a distributor.

indieWIRE: How much did you spend on advertising for this first week run?

Macky Alston: The great thing about a debut is that you don't have to buy advertising, because you get reviews. . . That functions as our advertising for the run, but as you go on, you need to continue to put stuff in there and unless they do features, they're done with you editorially. And you have to pay for the space in the magazines. . . But truly our goals, our priorities, given a film like this, are more a grassroots approach to screenings. We've gotten a grant from the Ford Foundation to do a broad-based grassroots, educational distribution campaign.

We're going to be doing that throughout the year at churches, synagogues, community centers, schools, universities, etc. I'd rather be doing that now than self-distributing to art houses because it's a more focused approach and it's a broader reach. Even if you have a successful art house run, the numbers are not so great. It's more the platform it gives, the profile that it gives to your film, particularly in preparation for the television run. We'd love that, but given we only have X amount of dollars, it's [a matter of] where we invest it. And the television broadcast is in Spring/Summer '98, national PBS, as a part of something they're developing called the Television Race Initiative... And that is where you get your broadest audience.

iW: Do you think that a "Hoop Dreams" type phenomenon could...?

Alston: I would say no. Miramax has yet to call us, you know what I'm saying? The truth is that those folks saw it at Sundance and responded to it, but said 'there's not enough money in this, we think, for us. We think it definitely has a theatrical life, but the way you should do it is self-distribute it.' There's wonderful examples of people who have done that successfully, such as Bruce and Joe [Sinofsky] with "Brother's Keeper" and "Paradise Lost." However, that's a very specific choice. Will I do that for the next year or so or will I begin to work on the next film? And will I invest my time with "Family Name" in the next year on art house distribution or will I invest it in grassroots distribution? But this specific film, which is really about the conversation across the divide of race in the United States, my feeling is that better than just getting it to all the art houses, I'd rather facilitate conversations in a different kind of way.

iW: As far as money goes, though, this kind of distribution, this kind of grassroots plan, isn't really going to help?

Alston: But that's not the goal. The goal is to continue to be able to do the work that I want to do. I really chose this topic because it meant so much to me anyway, so if I never pulled it off, I would never have regret the years that I had spent doing the work. You know what I'm saying? So it got made and we raised a lot of money for it. And yet, we still have a lot of debt and we have money to raise for the grassroots distribution. . . The only way that a documentary [can make money], except for the rare exception like "Crumb" or "Hoop Dreams," is television and foreign sales, which we made. We just made our first foriegn sale to Italy. England and France are both engaged with our foriegn sales agent.

iW: Did you think about foreign pre-sales?

Alston: Yeah. We didn't get any. But it had to with my track record. The reality was they didn't know who they were banking on. I had made a few short documentaries for hire.

iW: How did you raise the money?

Alston: We started with small Southern foundations. They were very interested in the project. They had not had a whole lot of experience funding media, but they weren't closed to the idea. For some, we were their first film, but these were generally not foundations that specialized in funding media projects, but they were interested in the subject matter. Liberal, Southern Foundations: Bittle, Mary Reynolds Babcock, The Semila Foundation in Greensboro, the Craig Wall Foundation in South Carolina. And then we shot a good bit, made a trailer, and went for some of the usual suspects: NYSCA- New York State Council for the Arts, a bunch of others...

iW: What was the time span?

Alston: I started full time in September '93, got my first grant in December '93, started shooting in January '94, and we finished January '97. Then it premiered at Sundance.

iW: And you got the Freedom of Expression award. Did you expect it?

Alston: I wasn't expecting anything. We had never screened it, except in rough cut forms. I had a sense that it was good enough, and it was accepted, so I thought 'they want it, they can have it.' But I had no idea how people were going to respond. It's a difficult subject to tackle. I remember sitting with a friend who's a Southerner and he said, as I was telling him the film I was going to make, "Macky, you are going to get skewered." And you know, that was part of the reason why I was interested in the subject matter. It was a taboo. It was an untouchable topic particularly from the white person's perspective. So many people I know, like myself, are sort of inhibited, locked in our own PC silence. And that's not a constructive approach, so I dared to reveal my own naivete, awkwardness, bumbling white liberalism in the hope that through the process I would grow and that the process would be helpful and enlightening. And that's the response I've got. Instead of being skewered, I've gotten a sense of appreciation that this was done. Really it's acting as a catalyst for people to say, "well, you know, I thought exactly as you did." Which is exactly what I hoped for, to spark that kind of dialogue. This is one perspective and I wanted it to provoke others to express their perspectives.

[For more information on "Family Name" and screening dates, see their website @ http://www.opelika-pictures.org.]