PBS picks up Pittsburgh filmmakers' 'Moundsville' documentary

“Moundsville,” a documentary about a tough times and transitions in a small West Virginia riverside town, is coming to PBS stations across the country beginning in March.

Made by Pittsburgh-area filmmakers John W. Miller and Dave Bernabo, “Moundsville” tells its story through the eyes of residents who have seen the town’s manufacturing base replaced by fracking and Walmart.

Miller got his first glimpse of Moundsville while reporting on global mining for The Wall Street Journal. After moving to Pittsburgh in 2011, he left the Journal in 2016 to focus on independent, local projects and met Bernabo at a party.

With Moundsville still on Miller’s mind, the pair decided to do the documentary and spent a good part of 2018 there filming, supported in part by a grant from the Pittsburgh Arts Council.

The film premiered locally in January 2019 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Miller and Bernabo subsequently spent most of the year promoting and screening the film and blogging about it and related issues and personalities at moundsville.org.

Starting a conversation

Miller says that, through the movie, he and Bernabo were interested in “starting a conversation about what’s going on in American lives, apart from national politics — a more civil dialogue than most of what we’re hearing every day.”

That’s particularly important, he says, in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

The PBS distribution agreement “is a dream come true,” Miller says. “It’s a good calling card to have, and it lets us share the movie with a lot more people.”

“Last month, we got a call from Angee Simmons, the new director of content at (the National Educational Telecommunications Association), an organization that supplies 338 PBS stations around the country,” Miller says on the Moundsville website. “ ‘Moundsville,’ she said, was in a stack submitted almost a year ago. It had fallen through the cracks. But she had watched it and loved it, and now she wanted to screen it on PBS.”

“It’s rare for an indie project to get picked up,” Miller told the Tribune-Review. “Most of their documentaries come from PBS affiliates.”

Local voices and stories

“NETA’s program service celebrates local voices and stories from all corners of our country,” Simmons said in a release. “(‘Moundsville’) is told with a lot of heart from the people who call it home. After watching, I knew I wanted to share it with public television audiences.”

“ ‘Moundsville’ is the biography of a classic American town,” the release says. “It’s a Trump-supporting town, but there is no mention of Trump or any other national political leader in the film. The story told is a bigger one, from the native American mound the town is named after, to the arrival of the world’s biggest toy factory, to an economy based on Walmart and fracking and a new generation figuring it all out. The goal of the film is (to) affirm the community-building and healing value of shared narrative.”

It’s unclear yet how many PBS affiliates will pick it up, Miller says.

It will be available to 338 PBS stations nationwide over the next three years. From its original 74-minute run time, the film will be cut to 57 minutes and close-captioned to suit PBS standards.

It will also be available on the PBS YouTube channel.

“There will be big pushes in spring and fall, so probably in March it will start showing,” he says.