Fort Maria

October 28, 2018 · Knoxville Museum of Art · 2:00 p.m.

Filmmaker Thomas Southerland will join us to discuss the film.

Maria is a woman with no country. A Bulgarian immigrant and adoptive mother of a black daughter, she finds herself suddenly stricken with agoraphobia following a break-in at her home in Kentucky. When her daughter’s aging dog dies, Maria’s confinement puts her into equally painful and funny situations that soon entangle her neighbors.

​As Maria copes with the issues that have led her— a world traveler— into her self-inflicted prison, her daughter Meredith discovers her own identity through a search for her biological family.

“Shot in silvery black-and-white by writer-directors S. Cagney Gentry and Thom Southerland, Fort Maria is what the filmmakers call ‘an unscripted filmic experiment’ — a description that might suggest something arch or humorless. But it’s neither, avoiding heavy-handed artifice and narrative cliche and finding the tenderness, fire and everyday absurdity beneath its contained-verging-on-deadpan surface.”— The Hollywood Reporter

“[P]owerful and surprising…full of essential human moments and authentic considerations of race, culture, love, and what truly makes up a family.” — Ashland Independent Film Festival

About the Filmmakers

Thomas Southerland‘s first narrative feature, Proud Citizen, won the Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2014 and eight other Jury and Audience awards at festivals around the country and is streaming on Fandor. His two short documentaries, Lamp and Lonely Kingdom, screened at numerous festivals in 2016 and 2017. Lonely Kingdom won the Best Documentary Short Jury Prize at the Charlotte Film Festival.

S. Cagney Gentry is a filmmaker from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a faithful Demon Deacon and a child of Appalachia. His debut feature, Harvest (2015), was an exploration of aging and solitude deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The film played several festivals across the country and was awarded one of the top prizes at the Athens International Film + Video Festival.