I was raised in a small town in eastern Iowa. My friends’ parents ran small farms or local stores; some commuted to factory jobs in nearby cities. Our collective experience of life was not classless, but we did believe that any hard-working person could provide a decent life for their families.

In the mid-seventies I moved to rural West Virginia where I encountered true poverty for the first time. In a former coal company town called Widen, I saw the rows of small company houses, the abandoned company store and collapsed coal tipple. Ten years later I would witness haunting reminders of this place in my own hometown and in other towns throughout the rural Midwest. These experiences have stayed with me to this day.

As a graduate student in Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, I returned to West Virginia to make Company Town, a film about Widen. I spent weeks getting to know residents of Widen--people living what some would consider limited lives.

I was influenced by the classic cinema-verité films I had seen when I moved to Boston in 1978—Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker’s Primary and Happy Mother’s Day; the Maysles Brothers Salesman and Grey Gardens and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer. My response to these films was transformative. This was a cinema that captured life as it is really lived--filmmaking that drew on something unique to the film medium--“the feeling of being there.” It is an aesthetic that still animates my work.

I approach my own work with openness to the human condition in all its complexity, and that is what, above all else, I seek to portray on the screen. My intent is to move beyond observation to a deeper immersion into the lives of the characters.

Losing Ground (1989) is a psychological portrait of an Iowa family facing the loss of a family farm. Raise the Dead (1999) explores the lives of itinerant holiness preachers practicing a grassroots religious tradition in the shadow of televangelism. Company Town and Losing Ground explore the disintegration of community and Raise the Dead elegizes a dying way of life.

Scenes from a Parish, a feature-length documentary about a working-class Catholic parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is my most complex and expansive work to date. Saint Patrick’s Parish has become a kind of social laboratory as a traditionally Irish-American institution confronts the majority Latino city that surrounds it. Scenes from a Parish examines the fragility of community life through the evolving personal stories of nine characters over four years.

Scenes from a Parish explores ideas about community through a cinematic exploration of character and place. The big issues of the film are raised quietly in encounters that grow out of the rhythms and texture of everyday life. My intent is to instill these small moments with a resonance that reaches beyond a particular place, to reveal something about my country at this moment in time.