Film/Video
watermen
Sound: Holly Fisher
Original Film Lab: DeLuxe Film Lab, NY, NY – original A&B plus audio print elements were lost when DeLuxe went out of business.
Restored to Digital Video by Maryland Public TV, screened spring 2010 and 2011 by MPTV; screened at The Environmental Film Festival, March, 2011
(©2014)
It’s a classic! You’ll never sell it!
awards/events
Bronze Medal, Atlanta Film Festival (1968)
synopsis
In 1968 myself and co-director Romas V. Slezas filmed the annual Skipjack Race off the coast of Annapolis, Maryland, focused especially on local folk hero skipjack Captain “Daddy Art” Daniels, who won that day. Over the next three years we filmed Daniels, his family, his Afro-American crew, and his colleagues catching oysters, at home, singing & preaching in church, high school graduation, last sail maker (Wenona, MD), three generations featured (1967) on Maryland TV station, i.e. the passing of a way of life on the Chesapeake Bay. The film tells a simple story of the watermen who work the last sailing fleet of workboats in North America and it is perhaps also the story of Manifest Destiny as it is playing out in an isolated pocket of American culture.
Slezas and I worked as a cinema verité team. We filmed over three years, beginning in 1966, returning when we had funding to continue. The film has no outside narrator, and is carried by stories lived and/or told by the characters themselves. In the fall of 2009, I returned to Wenona to film Captain Daniels, now in his late 80s, who would skipper the “City of Crisfield” in one more Skipjack race. By now Daniels had become a local legend, and was featured in multiple T.V. interviews plus the local Deals Island parade, filmed waving from the back seat of a red convertible.
At that time two of Daniels’ sons were still catching oysters in the traditional way; his oldest son was also a local country western singer who broadcast especially to other fishermen from his own Skipjack. His youngest son “Bobby” had become a well-respected and fiery preacher. I’m told he oystered well into his nineties.
Captain Arthur “Daddy Art” Daniels, waterman, Minister, and great-great-grandfather, died at home in Wenona, MD, June 2017 at age 95.
screenings
The Environmental Film Festival, Washington, D.C. (2011)
Atlanta Film Festival, Atlanta, GA (1968)
Constitution Hall, Washington D.C. (World Premier, 1968, sponsored by The National Geographic Society)
Broadcast on Maryland Public TV (spring 2010, 2011)
grants
The National Geographic Society (1968)
