A drama that played out in homes throughout the Mahoning Valley in 2019 will play out on PBS World this Tuesday.
The documentary “Bring it Home,” which chronicles the impact of the closure of the Lordstown General Motors plant on its workers and their families, will be shown at 8 p.m. Tuesday (on WVIZ-TV, digital signal 25.3) as an installment of the series “America ReFramed,” and it will be available for streaming at worldchannel.org after its premiere.
Writer-director Carl Kriss, a Chicago native who graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio, first came to the area in 2017, when he was working on an independent project about those who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
“The more I talked to people, the reason they crossed over had less to do with politics than a growing frustration that the system wasn’t working,” he said. “The more I learned, the more I realized the area had taken a lot of hits. What stood out to me as unique is that a lot of these families stuck together. There were a lot of these family bonds, a strong sense of community I’ve never experienced before, and I loved it.”
He was working on that project when GM announced that Lordstown wasn’t allocated a new vehicle to replace the Chevrolet Cruze, putting the future of the plant in jeopardy.
“I quickly saw the way the (national) media was covering it, going the political route, focusing on the politics and the fact that Trump promised a lot and might not be able to deliver,” Kriss said. “This was deeper than that. I wanted to show this film from the perspective of a family that would represent those feelings and share with people what the experience was actually like, so people not from the Mahoning Valley would understand what it feels like to lose an industry like that.”
Local GM workers faced a choice — either uproot their families and move to other GM plants in order to keep their health benefits and accumulate enough service time to earn their pensions or leave GM and try to find work locally that would come close to paying what their union jobs provided.
That’s the story Kriss wanted to tell. When he couldn’t get funding for the project, Kriss took a job as a videographer for WKYC-TV in Cleveland and worked on the documentary on weekends and off hours.
The filmmaker credited former United Auto Workers Local 1112 President Dave Green, who encouraged his members to talk to the media about the effects of GM’s corporate decisions on their lives, with making it easier to find cooperative families. Green, who now works in Indiana, also is featured in the documentary.
Kriss spent a lot of time with people without the camera rolling, and families often would invite him to stay for dinner after recording an interview.
“People were always trying to feed me,” he said. “I think that helped me gain their trust, spending time with people and not filming. There were a lot of off-the-record conversations as people, and I’d share what was going on in my personal life.”
While Kriss interviewed many GM workers, families and politicians for the project, the film focuses on GM employee Tom Davis, his wife Tiffany (who teaches at Lordstown Elementary School), and their two children, Brian and Aubrey.
The Davises gave Kriss extensive access to their lives, even allowing the cameras to roll on Tom’s last day at home before heading to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to start work at the GM plant there.
“There were times we thought, this is private, maybe we shouldn’t let him in,” Tiffany Davis said on Friday. “But, no, if people are going to understand this, they have to see the the pain.”
Kriss handled the project with sensitivity and “became a part of the family,” she said.
The Davises and other workers featured in the “Bring It Home” got a sneak peak before its television debut.”
“It was really emotional,” Tiffany Davis said. “We’re still living this nightmare. It’s still really painful to see it. … We cried almost the whole time we were watching.”
Tom Davis still is working in Bowling Green and making the 457-mile drive each way to see his family on the weekends. Tiffany Davis still is teaching in Lordstown, and she and the children live in Girard with Tom’s mother.
Former GM worker Tiffany King hasn’t had a chance to watch the film yet, but said she is looking forward to it.
“At the time I just wanted to share with as many people as possible what happened to us,” King said. “I just wanted to put our story out there, and Carl was gracious enough to let us have that moment.”
King decided not to take a job at a another GM plant. Instead she decided to focus on what started as a side business, her dessert shop Bumpers Creamcakery. The name was inspired by her time working on bumpers on the assembly line.
“Bring It Home” originally was scheduled to premiere in March 2020 at the Cleveland International Film Festival, but Kriss pulled the film when the in-person festival was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and moved online.
He reached out to PBS last summer because he thought the documentary would be a good fit on “America ReFramed,” and he was pleasantly surprised when they contacted him. The network also didn’t ask for changes.
“They were really hands off,” Kriss said. “They look at it as, ‘You’re the filmmaker; we’re the distributor.’ They gave me a lot of freedom.”
“Bring It Home” also will be featured at the 45th Cleveland International Film Festival, which will remain online for 2021. The film festival cut is about 15 minutes longer and updates the workers’ stories featured in the PBS edition. It will be available to stream from April 8-20.
While it was frustrating at the time, Kriss said he believes the delayed debut ultimately benefited the documentary.
“I didn’t want it to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump or pro-Democrat or anti-Democrat,” he said. “I wanted people to see beyond that. If it came out before the elections, it would have been viewed through a political lens. Coming out after the election became a good thing. People could focus more on what’s happened to the families and what’s happened with GM. I wanted people to focus more on what the real conflict is.”
Where to watch …
“Bring It Home” will premiere at 8 p.m. Tuesday on PBS’s WORLD Channel (WVIZ-TV, digital signal 25.3), and it will be available to stream after its premiere at worldchannel.org. An extended cut of the documentary, about 15 minutes longer than the PBS version, will be available as part of the 45th Cleveland International Film Festival.
It will be available from 11 a.m. April 8 until 11:59 p.m. April 20. Tickets to stream it on demand are $10 and are available at https://ift.tt/3r70RQb.
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