The island city of Eastport is one of eight communities from around the country featured in a new HBO documentary directed by Academy Award nominated filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan. Our Towns, which will debut Tuesday, April 13, at 9 p.m., is a portrait of America and how the rise of civic and economic reinvention is transforming small cities and towns across the country. The documentary is based on the best-selling book, Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America by journalists James and Deborah Fallows, and spotlights ingenious local initiatives and explores how a sense of community and common language of change can help people and towns find a different path to the future.
     The film is a visual treat of colors and textures with drone and aerial footage contrasting with on the ground portraits of people and their places. What were hundreds if not thousands of hours of interviews, film and sound footage were edited into concise and elegant portraits of each community. Eastport, for example, is shown from the air with the sparkling water of Passamaquoddy Bay highlighted by a lone lobster boat circling a trap or weather beaten homes snug among summer greenery as deer pick their way across lawns in the dawn light. Old photographs are used to illustrate how past hardships and industries have changed the city over time.
     Each of the eight communities profiled -- revealed in series -- is given the same careful attention to the wide and narrow approaches to those ingenious local initiatives. Each, James Fallows observes, has the same pride in their community and the same awareness of how they're often seen by outsiders. Chris Gardner, director of the Eastport Port Authority, sums it up when he says, "When someone hears you're from a small town, they just assume that you haven't been paying attention" to the larger world. However, the outsider perceptions were not an impediment to any of the profiled communities shrugging them off and getting on with figuring out how to better the economic and cultural life around them.
     Eastport resident Elijah Brice captured the nature of the island city when he illustrates how after a day lobster fishing during the summer he might then go home, take a shower and head out to a performance at the Eastport Arts Center, a gallery opening or a music gig. The city has embraced its contrasts: the working waterfront of fishing industries and the deep water port activities on the other side of the island in unspoken partnership with the city's long history as an arts community that has driven the past two decades of downtown redevelopment, tourism and recent telecommuter and early retiree relocation. It's the little city that might, suggests Fallows; and what it may look like down the road may be less important than the long history of survival that suggests a way will be found no matter what.
     Other communities show equally engaged residents working on diverse paths to develop civic pride and self determination. In Columbus, Miss., the director of an industrial park explains that as a southern community with a painful past of enslavement, Confederacy and Jim Crow, it is critical to make sure that the town's foot is in the future and not the past. Sometimes the town gets confused about it, he admits. However, efforts to change such thinking involve plenty of people, including college students who researched the town's past and recreated characters for a public performance that marked the recognition of Sanford Cemetery and the enslaved and free African Americans buried within its grounds. A Black hotel manager, who relocated to Columbus from New York City, found acceptance of her managerial position difficult at first, but with time it has become easier. She is hopeful. "The younger generation are very accepting of diversity," she says. "The past is the past, and Mississippi is striving for change."
     Nestled in the West Virginia mountains is Charleston, an old coal mining community that was hit hard by the industry's collapse and the opioid epidemic. Young entrepreneurs are buying up old buildings, renovating and adding breweries, bookstores and other cultural resources.
     Artist Charly "Jupiter" Hamilton was commissioned to create his West Side Wonder mural on a large brick facade. It is a riot of color and movement. He slows the viewer down by pointing to a woman in a wheelchair, a veteran who was also homeless and the man who pushed her wheelchair around town. He points to others, each a member of the community with a story that anchors them. The mural becomes increasingly poignant as he draws a map of those who are gone and those who are present.
     Another innovation in Charleston is the Project West Invest initiative. Two police officers recognized that the west side of the community was suffering from crime and needed a revitalization boost. The two officers spearheaded a program that includes public funding to encourage police officers to buy a home in the neighborhood, fix it up and live in it. Ten officers entered the program in 2014. In 2018 the program expanded to include teachers to help reduce educator turnover in the local school system.
     There is no end to the stories and ideas of how community members looked at ruin and turned it around. In the 1980s Bend, Ore., was mostly shuttered after the logging industry collapsed. Bend was firmly a blue collar town revolving around the timber industry; when the last sawmill closed 30 were employed. Today the former mill complex houses about 4,000 business owners and employees of all sorts. Town leaders looked at the languishing lumber yards and former forestry lands in and about Bend and began careful housing development, emphasizing neighborhood through front facing porches, walkable distances to amenities and more. Today Bend attracts telecommuters and others fleeing the long commute times of life in such settings as Los Angeles, Calif. The quality of life and access to outdoor recreation are the two top attributes that bring people there, proponents say.
     Beyond the stories, the filmmakers never forget that it's the people who make the communities tick. Eastport in particular was emphasized with still portraits of people from all walks of life. Something both ephemeral and timeless was captured by the camera: the human need to connect and create.
The documentary will be available on HBO and to stream on HBO Max.