York Mini Festival This Week

Media and Documentary Projects and the Southern Foodways Alliance, two institutes of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, will present Three Recent Foodways Films by Joe York on Thursday, October 20 at noon in Paul B. Johnson Commons on the University of Mississippi campus. The event is free and open to the public.

“Hot, Wet Goobers” is York’s latest film. It honors Hardy Farms of Hawkinsville, Georgia, the 2011 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award Winner. Hardy Farms is a family-owned enterprise, in business since 1935, specializing in fresh-dug green peanuts which they sell on the wholesale market, and boil at roadside stands.

A graduate of the Southern Studies Master’s program at UM, York has made more than 30 films with the Southern Foodways Alliance, including the feature-length Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House. York also made Mississippi Innocence, a film about two wrongly-convicted Noxubee County men exonerated from murder through the Innocence Project, which was shown several weeks ago at the Newseum in Washington and will be screened at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival this week.

This screening recognizes a milestone for the Media and Documentary Projects of which York is an employee.

This fall, Media and Documentary Projects formally joined the College of Liberal Arts as an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. This partnership will ensure that Southern Studies students have access to an excellent filmmaking program as part of their academic studies. The Center’s documentary photography program, led by Dr. David Wharton, has seen significant growth over the years, and the formalization of filmmaking as part of the curriculum will strengthen UM’s already strong reputation as a center for documentary studies.

MDP director Dr. Andy Harper said “When I took over Media and Documentary Projects eight years ago my goal was to find an academic home from which to tell stories of the people and traditions around us. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture has been doing that for over 30 years, and I can’t think of a better place for us to be.”