Filmmaker Liz Marshall had more than one purpose in mind three years ago when she set out to make the documentary Midian Farm. “It was a personal need to understand my family history that had not been told or understood in a cohesive, beginning, middle, and end kind of way,” she told Coast Reporter in a recent interview. “But I was also facilitating something bigger, and wanted to bring the story threads together to understand a piece of Canadian history.”
In Midian Farm, the ninth film she has directed since 2001, Marshall weaves a touching and warmly objective narrative of love, family, community and the sincere search by many in her parents’ generation for a lifestyle that was workably cooperative, communal and kind. It’s also a story of how projects and families – even those rooted in wholesome ideals – can have an unanticipated frailty and quietly come undone.
The 80-minute documentary, which has a one-time screening on Saturday, Aug. 10 at 2 p.m. at Raven’s Cry Theatre in Sechelt, is titled after an 85-acre rural property on the east side of Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto. Inspired by the low-key Christian leadership of Marshall’s father, Grainger Cowie, the dozens of idealistic young boomers who helped develop the project intended it to be both a working farm and a refuge from the city.
For a few years in the early 1970s, it worked beautifully. Cowie’s teachings were the opposite of fire-and-brimstone evangelism, and the long-haired boomers he attracted were not goofy, peace-and-love dopers. People worked hard and things got done; there was small-scale farming and big-hearted fellowship. But even in such a community, pressures build, plans falter, and forces of nature can present daunting challenges. Marshall – who was a toddler at the time – tells the story through many first-person accounts from community members, and a rich archive of photos. The film’s final sequences show that though the project floundered, the friendships that informed it remain.
The fate of Midian Farm follows a story arc familiar to many North American and European boomers, who joined utopian-tinged communities back in the day. And while there are other non-fiction films about those times, Marshall said she found none that recounted such a story in Canada. “That was also a motivation, to tell a piece of our history and put it on the record,” she said. “And I feel like that’s what I’ve done.”
Marshall, who is based in Toronto, is especially pleased finally to be showing the 2018 film on the Coast, where she has extensive family connections, starting with her grandparents, who owned a home in Sechelt. Her mother’s sister, Nancy Budd Denham and husband John Denham moved here in the late ‘70s. Later came brother Jim Budd with spouse Debbie Mealia. “And then my brother Mike [Cowie] came, and then my dad moved here,” Marshall said. “And now my mom has just moved here. Who knows, maybe others will follow.”
Marshall will be on hand Saturday afternoon for questions and answers following the screening.
