In 1998, fleeing the San Francisco dot.com tsunami and the rising cost of living that came along with it, we landed in Charlottesville, Virginia. To ease our sense of culture shock we sought out the most unusual neighborhood we could find. We thought we would be bored without the cast of urban characters we had come to observe and love in our big city life. Boy, were we wrong. Hellooo Belmont!
With neighbors on our right skinning deer and smoking dope at night, a blind couple across the street raising a very polite juvenile delinquent, the marketing executive next door coming home blind drunk and smashing our car, the wandering mentally ill, the slow kid who befriended us, and the hipsters with a Surrealist performance space down the street, who could be bored? When we finally came up for air we realized we had to document this. Here was a place where people still had pigs and goats within the city limits, a place where the livestock auction was weekly entertainment, all hidden away in this little Ivy League town. No one back home would believe this; heck, most of Charlottesville doesn’t know what’s happening on this side of the tracks. So here we are, five and a half years into a portrait of our neighborhood -- a place steeped in enough history, aching beauty, and strange Southern Gothic undertones to make even the most cynical among us crack a smile.
Like most poor and under represented areas, Belmont lacks a comprehensive record of its history. Time flows through the neighborhood and events last only as long as memory. Though there are many approaches to recording history and many media to support the methods, we choose video to capture as much information as possible: the stories being told to us, and the hidden subtext in each conversation, and the environments which surround and nurture the storytellers.
The importance of these recordings and the edited compilation can be seen as both a snapshot and a signpost. A snapshot freezing the moment—this is what we sounded like, this is what we looked like; and a signpost – this is what we cared about, this is what we believed. As more urban expats dilute the original inhabitants, we feel the need to document the roots of this neighborhood and the struggles of this transition. In giving each interviewee a voice, we hope to raise other voices in this dialogue within our community and in other communities going through similar changes. In sharing our inspiration we hope this document will inspire others to document and preserve the unique character of their own neighborhoods.
