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‘North Putnam’ film garners ‘Indiana Spotlight’ award at Heartland Film Festival
INDIANAPOLIS — It’s an honor just to be nominated.
Some platitudes have become so passe for a reason.
Still, garnering inclusion in an international film festival, even one that takes place right up the road in Indianapolis, is sufficient reason for celebration.
With that in mind, actually walking away with an award is all the more impressive.
“North Putnam,” a documentary about the local school district directed by Joel Fendelman garnered the Indiana Spotlight Documentary Award this weekend as the 33rd-annual Heartland International Film Festival drew to a close.
Carrying with it a $2,000 cash prize, the award more importantly should help to promote the film and with it the mission of sparking action-oriented conversations about the interdependence between public schools and community development.
During a question-and-answer period following a screening in Noblesville on Sunday, the final evening of the festival, producer Beth Benedix elaborated further.
“The hope for this movie is to start conversations that will have an impact on public education and community development and rural education,” Benedix said. “We got funding to do an impact campaign, which is what I think the afterlife of the film, I think, is going to be. We were at the Sidewalk Film Festival (in Birmingham, Ala.) and Heartland, and we have what’s called the South Arts Southern Circuit, which is 14 screenings across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia next spring.”
She noted that the film has already been part of the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Ala., as well as taking part in the South Arts Southern Circuit next spring, which will be 14 screenings across the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. The festival circuit is not the final goal, though.
“What we’re really hoping to do is get this in front of everybody it needs to get in front of to do the kind of work we’re hoping it will do.”
To this end, each attendee of the two Heartland screenings was given a card with a QR code leading to https://impact.plusmedia.solutions/north-putnam.
“Please go check out the impact hub because it will give you resources,” Benedix said. “The campaign was funded by the Foundation for Systemic Change, which is an incredible organization, and it’s supported by the Partnership for the Future of Learning. There are documents there that are visions statements from the Partnership and from the National Rural Education Association that give context and more information for why we need this film and what we’re hoping to do. We’re hoping to make as much change as possible.”
Benedix was the force that originally got the idea off the ground. It began with her work in local schools through The Castle, her education non-profit organization.
“It started because I have a non-profit organization that works with the schools in Putnam County. I was just trying to find a way to bring more awareness to everything that our schools are up against,” Benedix said. “At that time, I happened to see another film that Joel Fendelman had made and showed it to my class at DePauw University. He came and visited my class, and I was just so impressed with his humility and style. I asked if he’d be interested in doing a film on public education, and he said yes.”
“I had never been to Indiana prior to making this film,” Fendelman said. “I grew up in Miami and New York City, so I’m sort of the coastal liberal coming here like, ‘Wait, Indiana? Where’s that?’ But I was intrigued by this offer to explore this world, this community and I felt so welcomed into it and trusted.”
At that, he turned and thanked Tyler Kuras and Dan McMurtry, both of whom figured prominently in the film, Kuras as the incarcerated father of an elementary student and McMurtry as school counselor at Roachdale Elementary School.
“The school board was a big part of that by saying, ‘Yes, we trust you to make this film,’” Fendelman said. “That really opened up the whole school. We could walk into any classroom at any point, pretty much. And did.”
While the teachers and students were initially self-conscious, that went away.
“Eventually we became sort of a fixture, and they got bored of us too,” Fendelman said. “Which is what you want, for them to be bored of you so they forget about you. That was exciting for me to really explore and tell this story.”
McMurtry affirmed this from the other side of the camera.
“It became second nature and was like Joel was part of our school,” McMurtry said.
That was a positive because, by Fendelman’s estimation, it took a couple hundred hours of footage over an 18-month period to yield the 90-minute documentary.
“There was a lot of filming,” Fendelman said. “Observational filming is a lot of just filming until something happens.”
Now the hope is that something will happen as a result of the film and what it depicts.
