Daily Sitka Sentinel

Eventful ‘14 Miles’ Reaching End of the Road

By ARIADNE WILL
Special to the Sentinel
    After two years of working on her video documentary series “14 Miles,” filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein has begun wrapping up the project.
    The series, which consists of two- to five-minute episodes focusing on the people of Sitka, launched in October 2017.
    “Part of it is wanting to pay attention to the pockets we don’t always pay attention to,” Frankenstein said. “There are these 14 miles, and there are so many things I didn’t know in a small space.”
    The 14 miles is the length of Sitka’s paved highway from one end to the other. Frankenstein has posted episodes of “14 Miles” on Facebook, YouTube, 360 North, Instagram, and her own website, “14miles.org.” She has also shown them at live events, and eventually they’ll be available on DVD at Sitka Public Library.

Ellen Frankenstein edits footage in her home studio on DeArmond Street Tuesday. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

    Frankenstein says that with her selected format, she was excited to create something that could end up on the Facebook timelines of people living anywhere.
    “You can’t control who watches it, and that’s the cool thing about social media,” she said. “We’ve encouraged people to share things, and some things have gotten lots and lots of shares.”
    These shares show many viewers don’t live here, Frankenstein has found.
    “One thing I discovered early on is that people who used to live here who don’t live here are some of the biggest viewers, as well as family members of people who live here and people who are interested in Alaska,” she said.
    While many members of Frankenstein’s audience may be scattered around the country, she hopes her work resonates with Sitkans, too.
    Paula Veshti, a student at the University of Alaska, Southeast, watched many of the episodes in the spring for her Humanities 120 class.
    The class, “A Sense of Place: Alaska and Beyond,” was taught by Ashia Lane. Students were asked to watch Frankenstein’s shorts and write their thoughts and opinions, which they would take to class for a discussion.
    “I learned things about Sitka that I didn’t know before,” Veshti said. “I didn’t know how connected we all were until I watched the videos.”
    Though Veshti says she felt she was shown the inter-connectivity of Sitka, she doesn’t believe the connections in Sitka are always the result of living within the 14 miles.
    “We’re not forced to talk to each other or forced to help each other out,” she said. “I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to do something because it’s a small town.’ I think people do things because they care about the general community of Sitka.”
    The idea of bringing the community closer through this project is something Frankenstein hopes to replicate elsewhere. She hopes her project will spark similar projects in other communities.
    “I want people who work on this to get inspired for their next work, but I also want this to be a model for other people,” she said. “I’m hoping there are other artists who say, ‘Hey, this is something that you could do, a series of deeply connected digital stories.’”
    To help spread her idea, Frankenstein has been working on the project with a diverse group of interns who include students in MFA and undergraduate programs from around the country as well as Americorp volunteers.
    Her most recent intern, Mireya Guzmán, is attending Northwestern University in Chicago. Like others coming from out of town, Guzmán arrived with an idea of the Sitka community. This idea, Guzmán said, was derived from viewing previous episodes of Frankenstein’s series.
    “It’s one thing watching the episodes from afar and not knowing anything about what Sitka looks like on the ground,” Guzmán said. “I remember being like, ‘This is really interesting, look at those little glimpses,’ but coming here, (the episodes) gain a whole different depth.”
    Guzmán explained that the depth of small divisions grew particularly after he arrived in Sitka.
    “You get the sense (of these small divisions) because every part is focused on a different part of the community, but you can justify it as ‘oh, that’s just what the filmmaker decided to do,’” Guzmán said. “When you’re actually in the filmmaking process and a part of a directorial decision, there’s these groups of people that sometimes don’t cross over.”
    Guzmán has been navigating these divisions – or absence of connection, rather – in a short that they’ve been working on, which centers around the LGBTQ community in Sitka.
    “I’ve been talking to people within the community who I think should know each other, and they don’t,” Guzmán said. “Before coming here I was like, ‘there have to be queer or LGBTQ people on this island,’ but there wasn’t really anything in the current episodes that pointed to that. Part of being here was me working to meet people, interview people that represented what growing up in Sitka or living in Sitka as an adult is as an LGBTQ person.”
    Guzmán’s hope to make an episode about Sitka’s LGBTQ community was something Frankenstein also had in mind.
    “At the beginning, a couple months in, we started making lists of episodes I thought we should cover,” Frankenstein said. “I knew I wanted a piece that was about sense of place through the eyes of preschoolers. I knew also I wanted to do one about the night shift, the people we don’t see.”
    Though Frankenstein understands that she is not telling everyone’s story, she hopes that her choices have accurately portrayed the depth she sets out to display in the first episode.
    “We can’t tell stories about everything and, sometimes, some folks feel like, ‘you haven’t told a story about me,’ ” she said. “Well, we had criteria of things and the community has also responded. There are a lot of layers to some of these pieces.”
    This depth is something Frankenstein hoped to establish from the project’s start: the first episode shows her driving the 14-mile length of the highway and talking about what she hopes to discover from her project.
    “Do the bits say anything? Is it a true portrait of the community?” she asked. “I don’t know how to judge that, but my goal from the beginning was to do a kind of collage of a time and a place.”
    These questions are something Frankenstein is still thinking about as she embarks on the conclusion of her series.
    “We want to reflect on the process and some of the questions,” she said. “At the beginning of the end (the concluding episode), we filmed the algae bloom at one end of the road, and the other end of the road, there’s the (Katlian Bay) expansion.”
    Frankenstein says that this change in Sitka’s landscape is a reflection of the change that has happened on a less visible, more sociological level.
    “It’s a metaphor: even in a small town, things have changed,” she said. “Politically and socially things have changed – we had no idea what would happen on the state level with the budget cuts. The pressure of climate change, I think there’s been accelerating in the last two years.”
    Though the wrap-up won’t cover everything that Frankenstein has noticed in the past two years, she hopes it will put a finish on what she has termed a “collage” of episodes and stories.
    “It’s like we’re screating little poems or short stories, and one of the things that can be really hard is determining the sum total of what the bits are saying,” she said. “We’re leaving this even though there are a lot more stories that could be told. There’s so much right in front of you that you don’t know about.”