Et Cetera

Now Streaming: People, Places, and the Passage of Time

Portraits and Dreams investigates the relationship between a rural community and the people who grew up there. Courtesy POV/PBS.

In the 1970s, photographer Wendy Edwald journeyed to Letcher County, Kentucky, where she taught schoolchildren to use cameras to document the world around them. The resulting images, collected in the award-winning book, Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians, captures the experience of growing up in this rural community — and, on a broader scale, the particular and unique ways landscapes and lives are intertwined in space and time. Turning the pages and looking at the photographs, we are, quite literally, seeing the world through the eyes of these inspired and inspiring children.

Forty years later, Edwald returned to Letcher County to reconnect with her former students, this time bringing with her a documentary crew. The result — a film, also called Portraits and Dreams, directed by Edwald and Elizabeth Barret — conveys the same intriguing pathos of the original project, rendered all the more poignant as we reflect on the changes in the intervening years. Reconnecting with these children, now adults, the film subtly explores the effects of time on both people and place.

Portraits and Dreams was coproduced by PBS/POV with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and is now showing in community screenings around the country (some virtual). Stream the film at home.

Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP, is Planning's regular film reviewer. He teaches at MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and writes on cities and film at Urban Film.

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