Environmentalist's barefoot walk across U.S. inspires Pittsburgh filmmaker

One day, a friend of Pittsburgh filmmaker Julie Sokolow turned her on to a unique man she’d met while attending Brown University.

He was a poet and author named Mark Baumer. Sokolow became an instant fan.

“I’d see her posting about his barefoot journey across the country and immediately his sense of humor pulled me in,” said Sokolow, whose documentaries have included profiles of a Pittsburgh man with Asperger’s syndrome making his way through the dating scene (“Aspie Seeks Love”) and New York City’s first openly transgender firefighter (“Woman on Fire”).

Baumer’s eccentricity appealed to Sokolow.

“He had a childlike wonder and a penchant for the absurd,” she said.

He also wanted to draw awareness to climate change. After his first nationwide walkabout in 2010, Baumer set out again in 2016 — this time walking barefoot after spending some time training his feet for the punishment — to raise awareness as well as to raise money for the New England-based activist group Fighting Against Natural Gas. He shot videos daily, posting to a variety of social media channels and discussing the walk, his thoughts about climate change and even the changing political landscape following Donald Trump’s 2016 election win.

“Right around that time, I was really feeling that climate change was the pressing issue of our time and why aren’t we doing anything about this?” Sokolow said. “Seeing Mark put his life on the line to protest climate change really struck a chord with me.”

Unfortunately, Baumer ended up literally putting his life on the line: He was struck and killed by an SUV during a stretch of the walk in Walton County, Fla., in January 2017.

“I was devastated,” Sokolow said. “I reached out to his family to say that we should preserve his videos and make sure people get to experience them.”

That was how Sokolow, working with Pittsburgh-based Animal Studio, came to write and edit “Barefoot,” which uses Baumer’s self-shot footage and interviews with family and friends to paint a portrait of the man.

For Sokolow, it was challenging on multiple levels.

“His cellphone was not recovered from the crash site, and we had no raw footage to work from,” she said. “So we used the YouTube videos, which were edited quite frenetically.”

It was also the first time that Sokolow was fully relying on others to tell the story.

“I’ve never made a film before about a deceased person, and that was really challenging,” she said.

The film captures both sides of Baumer — the carefree absurdist who would call local media to tell them “about this guy I saw walking barefoot across America,” and the dedicated environmentalist who nonetheless got emotional the night before leaving his Providence, R.I., home: “Part of me is a little scared, I guess, about what I got myself into.”

Sokolow hoped she was able to get Baumer’s message across.

“It’s hard to capture someone’s entire life and body of work as an artist in a 90-minute movie,” she said. “Barefoot” is about the passion of its subject, and the impact his death had on his loved ones.

“This artist was doing a quirky walk across America to confront climate change, but ultimately it’s about the loss of this person and how his family and community come to process it and accept it,” Sokolow said.

For more, see BarefootDocumentary.com or JulieSokolow.com.