An acclaimednew documentary about a Pulitzer Prize-winning, family-owned Iowa newspaper struggling to survive and continue serving its town will be one of the first films featured as Des Moines' Varsity Cinema hosts outdoor screenings ahead of its planned 2022 reopening.
"Storm Lake," will be shown at8 p.m. Sept. 18 in a lot at the southeast corner of25th Streetand CarpenterAvenue, steps from the theater at 1207 25th St.The art house cinema, which closed at the end of 2018, is being renovated as a venue where the Des Moines Film Society will showfirst-runforeign and independent films and hold cinema-related programs.
The showing will accommodate 200, and those attending areasked to bring blankets and lawn chairs. Ticketsare available throughvarsitydesmoines.comfor $10, or $13 on the night of the show.
The movie will premiere Thursday in Storm Lake, and showings also are planned in Iowa City, Winterset, Algona, Marshalltown and Sioux City, as well as across the country. It also will stream on PBS beginning Nov. 15.
Documentary co-director: 'It was one of those moments you never forget'
Veteran documentary-maker Jerry Risius, a self-described "news junkie,"was watching announcements of the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes when one in particular caught his attention: the prize for editorial writing, which went to Storm Lake Times editor Art Cullen for a series of commentaries on the role of giant agriculture companies inpractices that pollute Iowa's water.
“I grew up on a pig farm not far from Storm Lake, maybe an hour and a half," said Risius.
He realized the story of the twice-weekly, 3,000-circulationpaper would be the perfect subject for a film.
While visiting his hometown, Buffalo Center, later that year, Risius stopped in Storm Lake to see Cullenandspent an afternoon following him aroundto create a character reel he used to pitch the concept to the documentary's producer and co-director, Beth Levison,a fellow master of fine arts instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Though Risius and Levison had both aspired to work on a film together, it wasn't until a few months after Risius' initial pitch that Levison committed to the project after reading a Cullen opinion piece in the New York Times titled, "In My Iowa Town, We Need Immigrants."
“I was standing in my kitchen with my laptop on the counter, it was one of those moments you never forget," Levison recalled."I read the article and I was just completely wowed and it made me cry. I went and I looked at Jerry’s reel and I said, ‘We should do this.’ "
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The pair quickly began fundraising for the project and putting together a proposal, and by the end of March2019, filming for "Storm Lake" began.
Over the course of almost an hour-and-a-halfthe documentary focuses on Storm Lakeand the Storm Lake Times,the paper created and shepherded over three decades by the Cullen family in competition with the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune. It covers not only Storm Lake's part in the 2020 Iowa caucuses but also the town's day-to-day affairs.
The start of filmingfor the documentary coincided with the Heartland Forum, in which some of the candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating race answered questions from Cullen.
"We did that presidential forum but that's notthe reason we get up in the morning,"Art Cullen says early in the film. "Most people in Storm Lake care a lot more about whether garbage is getting picked up than whether Elizabeth Warren is in town."
As the project continued, Risius and Levison pondered when they should wrap production after the Feb. 3, 2020, caucuses. But in a matter of weeks,it became apparent the film's timeline would extend well past February.
COVID-19 and 'thin ice' for Storm Lake Times
"When COVID hit, we were — we knew that the community and the newspaper would be on very thin ice," Risius said."The entire world was trying to figure out up from down and down from up and where to go, and Art and the Cullens were no different.”
Levison added, "First we were concerned for the Cullens and then we were concerned for the community and then we started to think about the movie and we had a lot of creative calls with our team:'What does this mean and how can we go about it?' ”
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While COVID-19 affected nearly every industry in the early days of the pandemic, the documentary filmmaking sector faced a particularly high possibility of turbulence.
Unable to continue to safely conduct in-person interviews, “We were one of the early adopters to do Zoom interviews," said Levison. "People were calling us and asking us, ‘How did you do it?’ And in the end, I think people did it better than we did, to be honest, but we were one of the first.”
Persistent in their filmmaking, Risius went to his basem*nt for a camera and filmed the computer screen for the later portion of the film, checking in with the Cullens who express how a local newspaper, already on thin ice beforethe pandemic, struggled to survive 2020.
“We were dedicated to making a very intimate film that’s true to the people in it and the place," said Levison. "I think we all take local news for granted —I think we all think it’ll always be near the register at the supermarket and that won’t always be the case if we don’t do anything about it."
The film already has won praise from early reviewers, including the Hollywood Reporter, which called it"an elegiac heartland portrait." It won an audience award for Best Feature at AFI Docs, and Levinson received the New York Women in Film & Television Filmmaker Award for documentary at theProvincetown Film Festival.
Cullen, alongside Risius and Levison, is scheduled to attend several of the upcoming Iowa screenings, including the one in Des Moines. He and the filmmakers will answer audience questions after the Des Moines showing.
Varsity Cinema's new pop-up screen
"Storm Lake"sscreening at the Varsity Cinema marks one of the first two in-person screenings hosted by the cinema under the title Varsity Pop-up.
"We did receive a programing grant from Bravowhich did allow us to get a very high-quality outdoor cinema... and were looking for the right opportunity to do something with that," said Ben Godar, director of the Des Moines Film Society.
The first screening of the series,the 2012 Wes Anderson film "Moonrise Kingdom." will be at 8 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $5 on the Varsity website or $7 the night of the show.
Though Godar would like to see more films come to the Varsity's pop-up screen before the end of the year, he's not certain that the approaching winter will allow them. Regardless of what may come, though, he's eager for audiences to have an opportunity to see "Storm Lake" with the people behind the project.
"What’s so exciting to me about it is, this is exactly the kind of programming that we’ve always done," he said,"a special (advanced) screening with the artists in person.”
'Storm Lake' Iowa documentary showings
- Premiere—7 p.m. Sept. 16 and 6:45 and 8:50 p.m.Sept. 17, Vista 3,712 Lake Ave N.,Storm Lake.
- 7 p.m.Sept. 17,FilmScene in The Chauncey, 404 E. College St., Iowa City.
- 7 p.m.Sept. 17 and 18 and 2 p.m. Sept. 19, The Iowa Theater,121 John Wayne Drive, Winterset.
- 8 p.m.Sept. 18, Varsity Cinema pop-up,corner of 25th Street and CarpenterAvenue,Des Moines.
- 7:30 p.m.Sept. 21,State 5 Theatre, 315 E. State St., Algona.
- 7:30 p.m.Sept. 22, Plaza 9 Theatres, 2500 S. Center St., Marshalltown.
- 7:30 p.m.Sept. 30, Promenade Cinema, 924 4th St., Sioux City.
Isaac Hamletcovers arts, entertainment and culture at the Des Moines Register. Reach him at ihamlet@gannett.comor (319)-600-2124, follow him on Twitter @IsaacHamlet.
