Moving Midway

The past is not dead. It's not even past. - William Faulkner.

Humorous, poignant, probing and suspenseful, Moving Midway follows a real-life family commotion that swirls around one of America's most contested and controversial icons: the Southern plantation.

New York film critic-turned-filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire returns home to North Carolina and finds that his cousin Charlie Silver proposes to uproot and relocate the family ancestral home - Midway Plantation - to escape urban sprawl. Cheshire also comes across history professor Robert Hinton, who reveals that his grandfather was born a slave at Midway.

As Cheshire and Hinton explore the plantation mythology embodied in our cultural history - from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Gone with the Wind to Roots - Charlie meanwhile follows through on the Herculean feat of hoisting Midway several miles across a forbidding landscape.

But this event's drama leads to an even more startling surprise: the discovery of 100 African- American cousins that Cheshire and Silver never suspected, potent proof of America's long buried but increasingly important status as a mixed-race society.