Staunton filmmaker and documentarian David Verde will release several films next year.
One of the films is focused on North Central Avenue business owners in the aftermath of the 2020 downtown flood.
“It was fall 2020, work was slow due to the pandemic and I was desperate for a project that could occupy my time over winter,” Verde said in a press release. “I started to reach out to, specifically, the new collection of Latino restaurant owners along North Central Avenue in downtown: Chicano Boy, Gonzo’s Pollo, Gloria’s Pupuseria, Magdalina Bakes, and the now closed Taste of the Tropics. I was asking them if they’d let me interview them for a short video.”
When the flood hit Staunton in August 2020, Verde almost abandoned the film project.
“I took my bike out for a ride after the rain stopped, I saw all the damage and figured my project was tabled permanently. I got home, sat down briefly, and told myself: ‘These people don’t know me, they are not going to be happy to see me with a camera, but this is their story now.’”
The morning after the flood, Verde began filming the cleanup and kept filming until the last Latino businesses opened their new location nearly two and a half years later.
While filming and conducting research, other stories presented themselves, according to a press release, which Verde could not ignore. He created a short film/vignette of his journey to create the documentary, and he also created a film with a theme of urban renewals and the black community.
“Here I am trying to find historical archives, family records and photos, or arrange interviews with black community elders to get more history and background of this neighborhood before Urban Renewal. I’m suddenly watching videos from the 1990’s of local kids listening to people in their 60s, 70s, and 80’s talking about what life was like in Staunton in the early to mid-20th century,” Verde said in the press release of a documentary he is working on about the youth program called Newtown Kids which lasted about two years in the early 90’s, and provided youth living on Johnson Street and in the Newtown neighborhood with activities and intimate first-person history lessons from their elders.
Verde is focused now on finding donors, investors and grant funding for the films. Some of his work, such as historical records and digitized photos, will be available in the public domain online. He also hopes to partner with local organizations to find display space for his work in Staunton.
“Ultimately, all these projects, in some way or form, are going to afford me to tell a comprehensive story of the black community that once lived and worked around N. Augusta Street, Central Avenue and the neighborhood of Sunnyside, before and after Urban Renewal. That was after all, the catalyst of all this to begin with. It just has proved to be a hard sell and now I’m on a very curvy road to get back to that initial idea,” Verde said.
Despite roadbocks, Verde is grateful to be able to move forward with the films with the help of the local film community.
“If anything, these will be films made for Staunton, about Staunton, by people who live in Staunton.”
More information about the films is available online.
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Rebecca Barnabi
