Silver Dollar Road | Deadline Contenders Film Documentary
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00:00 We now have a fascinating film for you from Amazon MGM Studios.
00:11 It is Silver Dollar Road, directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck.
00:16 And Raoul Peck joins us now.
00:18 Thanks for being with us.
00:20 Thank you for the invitation.
00:23 This is the story of the Reals family of North Carolina, who for over 100 years have owned
00:30 a 65-acre plot of land along the Carolina coast, a really beautiful area that has become
00:37 sought after, shall we say, by a lot of very wealthy people.
00:43 And in recent decades, the Reals family has seen that land become the object of intense
00:49 desire by white developers who have wanted to dispossess them of it.
00:54 Before we get into some questions with Raoul, let's take a look at the trailer for the film,
00:59 which gets into what the land means to the Reals family and their circumstances in trying
01:05 to defend it.
01:10 It was town is what we always called it.
01:12 Grandma's taking us to town.
01:13 It was a beautiful memory until I became an adult and realized some of the things that
01:18 happened that made me think, "This is not such a pretty place anymore."
01:22 Growing up here on Silver Dollar Road was so magical.
01:29 It was the one place you could go, you wasn't worried about being targeted by the law.
01:37 That property was so valuable, and not from a monetary standpoint, but valuable because
01:43 of the history.
01:44 The first owner of the property, he was born in slavery times.
01:48 My great-grandfather died without a living will.
01:52 Before he died, he said, "Whatever you do, don't let the white man have my land."
01:57 Okay.
01:58 Yo!
01:59 This is our beach.
02:00 This is our land.
02:01 This is our water, our club, everything.
02:02 This is our land.
02:03 This is our land.
02:04 This is our land.
02:05 This is our club, our space, anything.
02:12 There's word of part of the property being sold to someone else that the family had no
02:18 knowledge of.
02:19 We was getting threats.
02:21 They came down and put eviction notice on a lot of Curtis and Melvin houses.
02:26 My Uncle Melvin told me, "I need your help.
02:30 If they're saying we have to sign our rights away or go to jail, I'm going to jail."
02:35 It was heartbreaking to see them shamed.
02:39 I went in at 52, come out at 61.
02:44 It took the best years of my life.
02:49 We fighting power.
02:50 We fighting money.
02:51 What are you doing?
02:54 They really wanted this land.
02:55 Can't you see that you're breaking?
02:57 If you clear out Silver Dollar Road, what you going to do with us?
03:01 What you going to do with poor people?
03:02 Period.
03:03 The family can shout from the rooftops, the truth, nobody listen to them.
03:14 This is ours.
03:15 Our ancestors left this here for us.
03:21 All of this is what you're fighting for.
03:31 The ProPublica did a remarkable investigation into this story, a piece written by Lizzie
03:37 Presser who's a producer on your film.
03:41 Is that how you became familiar initially with the story?
03:45 Yes.
03:46 When I came on board, the story and the project already existed for at least three years.
03:55 Lizzie and her team have also documented the whole process without really knowing what
04:01 they were actually going to do with it.
04:04 Because they were meeting so many people around that case and in the region and meeting scholars,
04:13 experts, et cetera, they were in a position of an incredible amount of material and archive.
04:22 If you know my films, archive is what I do.
04:27 When they asked me to come on board first as executive producer, I already saw the potential
04:34 of the story and the article itself was absolutely a great piece of journalism.
04:43 Then I met the family.
04:45 I went down there in North Carolina and on Silver Dollar Road.
04:53 It was an incredible meeting and finding that family being accepted by them and through
05:04 partly Lizzie who I've spent so many years with them.
05:09 I was really welcomed and I felt that I was at home.
05:14 Their story somehow became my story.
05:18 I come from a family of my father was an agronomist.
05:25 I grew up with land issues all my life, whether it was in Congo or in Haiti.
05:32 I got it right away.
05:36 That was the beginning for me of this story.
05:41 It's a very, very complicated legal case, which in some ways is by design.
05:45 Because once you get an issue of land ownership into the courts, well, the interests are stacked
05:51 against poor people, poorer people, be they black, white, Latino.
05:58 We don't want to get too much into those details because they are so arcane.
06:02 But it sort of came down to this notion of heirs property.
06:08 Because Mitchell Reales, who was one of the ancestors, when he died, he did not have a
06:12 will.
06:15 It became the property of all the heirs.
06:19 If they'd all held together, great.
06:22 But one unscrupulous uncle sold off his interest to white developers.
06:29 It all kind of rolled downhill from there.
06:33 You can't just say, "Oh, this is one isolated case."
06:35 No, it's really part of a system.
06:37 Well, exactly.
06:39 And that's the two aspects.
06:42 The personal one, I'm sure each one of us know what it is.
06:46 After a member of the family dies, sometimes all the really crazy emotion comes up and
06:53 some of the crazy uncle or the crazy niece come out of the woods.
06:59 And that's what happened there.
07:01 And then they are confronted with a very disturbing structural legal environment that existed
07:12 since this country has been built.
07:16 And to make sure that those that are underprivileged stay underprivileged and are not able, like
07:24 every other citizen, to accumulate wealth.
07:29 And then we come to what have become today the misery of both urban and countryside,
07:38 where poor families struggle to make ends meet.
07:44 And when they do, in the case of this family, where they were basically happy, they had
07:51 their piece of land, they could hunt, they were fishing, they made money, a lot of money
07:58 sometimes fishing.
08:01 They didn't need anybody.
08:03 And yes, they did not have a will.
08:07 The property was under what we call Heirs' Property.
08:12 But the disadvantage is that you don't have an actual paper that enables you to have help
08:20 from the government, to have rescue money or debt money after a hurricane.
08:28 But they didn't even ask for that.
08:30 They were living in peace with what they had.
08:35 And then the outside world came crashing and they had to basically, they tried to submit
08:42 them to what was happening all over the country.
08:49 Basically tourism, investment, and trying to use those properties for multi-million
08:59 dollars villas and decks.
09:03 So that's the core story.
09:05 And it's unfortunately, it's happening again and again these days, as it has for at least
09:11 150 years.
09:12 Yeah.
09:13 And one of the most shocking elements of the story is we heard in the trailer about Melvin
09:20 and Lycurtis.
09:21 Now, they were living on this disputed 13 acre plot, basically right on the water, beautiful
09:30 land.
09:31 And Melvin in particular is a fisherman and has done very well.
09:39 They're ordered off of their own land that is the only place they've ever known where
09:43 they grew up and they refused to vacate.
09:47 And so they're brought up on civil contempt charges in court.
09:50 Well, generally if you're sentenced to contempt of court, well, you might be in jail for a
09:56 month or two, let's say.
09:59 And after 90 days, you're supposed to come in front of a judge.
10:05 And that didn't happen here.
10:06 I mean, it's incredible to think how long they spent in prison on civil contempt charges.
10:11 Yes, it's unheard in the whole history of the United States.
10:16 And they could have stayed longer.
10:17 They were basically left there to die.
10:23 And they were not even in a federal prison where you have access to books, you have access
10:30 to sports, you can go out for multiple hours.
10:35 No, they were in a sheriff jail, basically let by themselves and basically left to rot.
10:45 Yeah, they're in county jail.
10:48 It's just extraordinary.
10:49 I mean, these are like holding cells basically, except for they're held there for eight years.
10:55 And again, to explore the backdrop of this, which is a story that's so important for Americans
11:03 to know, I think Black Americans know it, but Black families in the South have been
11:10 dispossessed of 12 million acres since roughly the 1950s.
11:16 This is according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
11:19 So we're talking 90% of Black owned land.
11:23 Yes, 90% of Black land loss.
11:28 So this is not happening by accident.
11:30 A lot of that farmland, for instance, is along the Mississippi, great farmland.
11:35 So this is systemic, as you've been saying, it's not accidental.
11:41 Yeah, and historically, as a matter of fact, the Black population have never really legally
11:51 had access to anything.
11:55 Most of the, even the pioneers, as we call them, going West, the federal and state government
12:04 were giving away land.
12:06 That was the way to access some sort of economic stability.
12:12 It was part, even as an immigrant, you would get a piece of land or you would buy for a
12:18 dollar or $5, multiple acres of land.
12:23 But funny enough, or it's not even funny, but the indigenous people, by the way, were
12:30 deprived of their own land and the Black part of the population who worked on that land
12:37 were also deprived because they were not considered citizens until the 14th Amendment, way late.
12:48 And even then, there was not any action that follows that, like some legal act that would
12:58 have given land to a wide number of the Black population.
13:06 So basically right there, you have the structural cause of poverty today for all minorities.
13:17 It's not rocket science.
13:19 That's exactly the origin of that.
13:23 A country that was built on land where every citizen had somehow access to land.
13:33 And by the way, it's also, even for the middle class, is one day to own your house, to have
13:39 a piece of land.
13:42 That's everybody's dream.
13:43 And for one reason, because that's the only way to really build some sort of wealth and
13:52 transmit that wealth to the next generation.
13:56 So when that part of the population was not able to do that, and worse, they were parked
14:02 into ghettos, they were parked into the worst schools existing, etc., etc.
14:09 So you have a structural design to bring those people where they are now, and mostly for
14:19 a lot of young Black men in prison.
14:23 Yeah, in the urban context, so much of it is about redlining of essentially confining
14:32 African American people to...
14:34 It takes many forms.
14:36 Many forms.
14:37 Here, it's a more rural context.
14:40 But again, we see how valuable this land has become.
14:43 And when it becomes valuable, there's some people with money who like to have it.
14:49 And don't forget, the few former enslaved who could buy land, they bought land that
14:56 they could afford, which was swamps, land, coastal land with sandy ground.
15:07 And they made it fruitful.
15:09 They made it something.
15:11 And then by the beginning of the 20th century, people start chasing them and start stealing
15:18 that very land that they really worked on and made something out of it.
15:24 And that's the dramatic irony, you know, land that nobody wanted, and they did something
15:31 with it, and then they were chased from it.
15:34 That's the start of what is called the big exodus to the North.
15:39 And it's not like the lynching or the racism that started it.
15:44 It started with killings and intimidation and chasing them to leave that properties.
15:53 And then the tourist industry in the 20s even made that worse, of course, then now all those
15:59 coastal land now became prime land.
16:03 So it's an addition of event and structural bias that created that situation.
16:14 Well, it's an extraordinary, compelling film.
16:18 It is on the 10 best list of the best documentaries of the year as announced by Doc NYC, premiered
16:25 at the Toronto International Film Festival, where your extraordinary film, I Am Not Your
16:30 Negro about James Baldwin also premiered.
16:33 We have been joined by director Raoul Peck.
16:36 The film is Silver Dollar Road from Amazon MGM Studios.
16:41 Thank you so much for being with us.
16:43 Thank you.
16:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]