News

Hendersonville filmmakers are dominating PBS-NC's summer season

By Bill Moss, Published: July 12, 2023

The award-winning moonshine documentary by filmmaker David Weintraub and the Center for Cultural Preservation will have its public television debut on PBS-NC at 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 3.

In addition airing the moonshine documentary, PBS-NC will also feature the center’s "Come Hell or High Water: Remembering the Great Flood of 1916" at 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 24.

Airing the two Weintraub shows means that PBS-NC is featuring six nights of documentaries by Hendersonville filmmakers this summer. The statewide public television network is currently broadcasting Paul Bonesteel's four-part "Shadow of a Wheel," a documentary about the ride across America he and 30 other teenagers from North Carolina made in the summer of 1982, at 9:30 every Thursday night in July.

 In "The Spirits Still Move Them," Weintraub weaves together interviews with nearly three dozen moonshiners and their families in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and the Dark Corner of South Carolina to present a story about moonshine history that’s never been told before.

"Everything we know about moonshiners and moonshining history is wrong,” Weintraub says. "The myth that all moonshiners are violent, lazy, drunk criminals hiding in the woods wearing long beards and longer arrest records has been recounted by the media for over 100 years. In reality, liquor production was hard, backbreaking work that only the most entrepreneurial farmers conducted which they did in order to survive difficult circumstances and put food on the table. It’s a fascinating story and far more interesting than the myths and distortions we’ve heard.”

Long-time Transylvania County moonshiner Tommy Dodson says that making liquor was about putting food on the table. “It was the hardest work I’ve ever had to do, but it was about survival, and continuing a mountain legacy,” he said.