James River adventure-turned-documentary finds TV distribution on VPM

Justin Black and his friends never set out to make an award-winning documentary when they dipped their paddles in the Cowpasture River for the first time in May 2021. They just wanted to float the entire freshwater stretch of the James River – 250 miles or so, from where the Jackson and Cowpasture rivers meet at Irongate to Richmond.

Black, Dietrich Teschner and Will Gemma were friends from UVA. Andrew Moonstone and Stephen Kuester played music with Black in Richmond. Some combination of the five had been paddling and camping along the James and other Virginia rivers for years.

Then, as Black said, “COVID happened. We had so much time on our hands. We were all kind of out of work, and we said, ‘Hey, let’s do the whole James.’”

Gemma, Black and Teschner had a background in filmmaking and editing, so it made sense to bring their cameras along on the trip to see what might come of it.

Teschner lived New York City, where he was trying to break in to acting when the pandemic hit. With those plans on pause, he returned to Richmond.

“We’d been writing together, working on scripts,” he said, of the group of friends. “But we’d [also] been doing these boat trips, and we were just like, ‘Let’s film one of these and see what we can do.’ We thought maybe a YouTube video would come out of it.”

That was their intent when they shoved off in two canoes and a kayak loaded down with camping and camera gear, two weeks of supplies, and a couple of acoustic guitars.

“We were just rolling film…” Black said. “That’s when stuff started going wrong, or right, depending on how you look at it. We had a series of events on that first trip that sort of created a three-act structure. Once we started tying in some of the history and environmental issues on the James, the film presented itself to us. By the end of the trip, we were like, ‘Hey, I think this is going to be a film.’”

Teschner agreed: “It kind of lined up perfectly for a dramatic telling of the journey.”

Of course, the group didn’t come home with a movie. They arrived back in Richmond after 13 eventful days on the water with 40 hours of footage. That was early June. By November 2021, Black, Dietrich and Gemma had cut, edited and written themselves a 75-minute feature film – “Headwaters Down” – and sold out a premiere at Gallery 5.

The positive feedback from that showing led the team to try entering the movie in the festival circuit. They won the Grand Prize at the RVA Environmental Film Festival in February 2022, then won best Virginia Film at the Richmond International Film Festival and were selected for the prestigious Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.

“The feedback we always get,” said Black, is that “everybody connected with the camaraderie and unexpected beauty.

“This river is so beautiful. The wildlife and the other things we saw along the way as well as the complicated history of using and abusing the river.”

Headwaters Down moves along at a contemplative pace. That’s by design, and Black’s soundtrack adds to the meditative mood. The friends aren’t rushing down the river. They take their time, enjoying each other’s company. The river is the main character throughout. But the movie is necessarily missing something: the James’ final 100 miles.

By the end of 2022, the Headwaters team knew they had to finish the job. The tidal river beckoned.

“We knew we couldn’t do that again without a budget,” Black explained. “It drained us all physically, emotionally, financially,” and “we wanted to approach the film a little differently. We couldn’t plan on all that [dramatic] stuff going on.”

Through the festival circuit, the crew learned from other filmmakers how to seek funding, specifically grants. They partnered with the James River Association and the Southern Documentary Fund. They set up a crowdfunding campaign, counting on the audience they built from their first movie to come through. Then the Cabell Foundation jumped in to support them.

By the summer of 2023, they had the support to launch the journey that would generate a second feature film – “Headwaters Down: Tidal River.” But even then, Black said, “if we had known how much work it would take to get it where it is today, we probably needed twice as much. There’s an insane amount of work that goes into making a film like this.”

Where is it today? After Part 2 premiered at the Byrd in February 2024, VPM contacted the team about licensing both movies to its partners around the state. Then American Public Television caught wind and decided it wanted to show the movie nationwide through its regional PBS partners. The VPM broadcast premiere is Thursday, May 22 at 8 p.m. for Part 1 and May 29 at 8 p.m. for Part 2. APT will distribute the films nationally starting on June 21. Both films can be streamed at Headwatersdown.com or on the PBS app.

It is a remarkably unlikely conclusion to a project born of pandemic-era boredom and love of America’s founding river.

“The best part is people coming up and saying, this makes me want to get out on the river,” Teschner said. “At the end of the day, that’s what we really wanted: for people to understand what an amazing resource this is.”