“Honest and empowering filmmaking.”
Pete Candler
presents
A DEEPER SOUTH:
AN EVENING OF SHORT FILMS FROM THE ROAD
“An important voice in the discussion of Southern culture and history.”
—Michael W. Twitty
⭕️
"Finally, a more complete view and presentation about a Southern History elsewhere rarely recounted with such truths." — C.L.
⭕️
"An honest look at our history is more important than ever." — K.H.
⭕️
"a triumph of truth telling" — A.R.
⭕️ "Finally, a more complete view and presentation about a Southern History elsewhere rarely recounted with such truths." — C.L. ⭕️ "An honest look at our history is more important than ever." — K.H. ⭕️ "a triumph of truth telling" — A.R.
Veteran road-tripper and Asheville resident Pete Candler presents a series of short films from the American South that beautifully and hauntingly capture the contradictions of the region. From short on-site sketches of neglected places to finely-crafted visual stories, Pete’s films invite viewers on a meditative journey through the mostly-undiscovered terrain of public and private memory in the nation’s most complicated and imaginatively fertile region.
Pete is “a quintessential storyteller, in the great Southern tradition of which he describes, but a storyteller of magnificent largesse of spirit: one whose heart is so large that you feel he has forgiven us for pain we don’t remember inflicting, and pain we don’t recall enduring, in both a cultural and personal sense.”
—Rosanne Cash
Pete’s vision as an artist is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our cities and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory. Pete is the host of the podcast, A Deeper South, author of The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997 - 2022, and A Deeper South, forthcoming from The University of South Carolina Press in May 2024.