The Lost and Found Series is featured this week in SLC City Weekly. Check it out below! 

How did the lost & found theme come about?
Each documentary in the series started as a separate project. One day, in an “aha!” moment, we realized that the five projects we had all been working on individually and collectively were actually tied together by the theme of losing and finding. Some deal with literal loss; others with the idea of being overlooked. All of them, directly or indirectly, question the role of film, and particularly documentary [film], in preserving stories.

Also, my experience has been that sometimes subjects present themselves to you as short pieces. When the idea for Tarkio Balloon came to me, for example, I always thought of it as being under five minutes. I wanted to “get in and get out” and leave the impression of loss instead of explaining it.

What was it like visiting Frisco, a ghost town near Beaver, Utah?
The first time we visited Frisco, we drove past it and had to circle back. The former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment and scraps of metal. This was the impetus for the documentary Boomtown—the idea that a town that once exported $60 million worth of precious metals and carried so much life could now easily be driven past.

It was when we started our research of Beaver County families with relatives who lived and worked in Frisco that we met Dick Davis. He was kind enough to grant us an interview for use in the film, but kept telling us that he didn’t have much to say and that we should really listen to these tapes he had. He brought out a tape player, cued up the cassette and pushed play. Our jaws dropped. Instead of scholars or family members talking about Frisco, it was the people who actually lived there! They spoke vividly about their time in the old mining town. He couldn’t remember how he came by the tape, but knew that one of the interviewees was a family member of his.

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Posted at 1:03pm.