Phenix grew up in segregated Lexington, Kentucky, and had been committed to social activism since the 1960s. As a filmmaker, she was part of the collective behind the landmark Winter Soldier (1972) and was producer and film editor on the gay rights documentary Word Is Out (1977), where she first worked with Veronica Selver. While attending a series of lectures on political activism by Myles Horton, Phenix got the idea for You Got to Move: "what Myles Horton was talking about, the idea of helping people realize and act on their own power to effect social change, was what I needed to make a film about."
Phenix began researching her project in 1980 and she invited Selver, her fellow editor and producer on Word Is Out, to collaborate as co-director. The production lasted four years, shooting when the crew was available to travel out to remote locations in South Carolina and East Tennessee. "What we were looking for was people who would talk about their process; what they were like before, how they felt powerless and what they did, step by step to change," explains Phenix. "The film has more women than men in it for this reason."
In between shooting they edited the footage, trying to find a shape for a documentary that told a diversity of stories and experiences. "We didn't just go in there and shoot a documentary," says Selver, "We lived in the community we were documenting, we were immersed." Myles Horton is present--there is footage of him both gardening at home and speaking to crowds--but the focus is on the ordinary citizens who used the tools that the school provided to make a difference. Among the folks featured in the film are Bernice Robinson, who taught literacy to African American adults in the 1950s; William Saunders, a mattress factory worker who helped organize a 100-day-long hospital workers' strike in Charleston, NC in the late 1960s; Becky Simpson, who fought the mining companies to pay for the devastating environmental damage of their strip-mining operations in Harlan County in the 1970s; and Bernice Johnson Reagon, a singer who used her voice to rally activists and marchers in the Civil Rights protests in Georgia throughout the 1960s. She later founded the acclaimed singing group "Sweet Honey in the Rock" and her music accompanies the film.
Myles Horton died in 1990, but the Highlander Folk School, now called the Highlander Research and Education Center, continues to be a force for change and empowerment. It recently celebrated its 75th anniversary.
Sources:
You Got To Move press kit. Milestone, 2011.
"Interview with Lucy Massie Phenix," Kyle Westsphal. Northwest Chicago Film Society, November 12, 2012.
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
