Press release from the filmmaker:
Nearing the end of a successful film festival tour, the indie documentary short, Almost Cured, about Brevard High School’s historic 1963 football team comes home to screen at Brevard High School on Monday, October 15 at 6 p.m. This free showing is sponsored by the City of Brevard as part of its 150th Anniversary celebrations.
“After the first touchdown, the crowd was a little less racist, and after the second touchdown, they were Almost Cured” recalled player Lloyd Fisher. Almost Cured is an honest, personalized account about racial integration in a small North Carolina Appalachian community in the midst of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Against a distressing backdrop of the South in tumultuous upheaval with widespread protests, bombings, deaths, and thousands of arrests, player Dr. Keith Elliott said that the teenage African-American players on the newly-integrated high school football team had the “weight of the world on their shoulders” as the team and community navigated the season to the championship game. Firsthand recollections by Coach Cliff Brookshire, players, and local experts are combined with archival media in this heartfelt and engaging film. The 30-minute documentary suggests that although we were and still are just ‘Almost Cured’, there is a glimmer of hope if we focus on what unites us.
“Soon after we moved to Brevard in 2004, I heard about this team and that Brevard was the first public high school to racially integrate in North Carolina in 1963. I could not help but wonder how such a historic event could happen in this small, almost all-white mountain community. Ten years later I began working on the film”. Directed by Tom Dierolf, a first-time filmmaker, Almost Cured has already been accepted into 13 film festivals. The film has garnered four awards including Best Short Documentary at the Ozark Foothills Filmfest, the Documentary Award at the FAMFEST International Film Festival, a Silver Award by Spotlight Documentary Film Awards and Best Documentary Non/fiction of the Month (Dec. 2017) by the Direct Short Online Film Festival. A successful Indiegogo Crowdfunding Campaign supported professional finishing editing and film festival submissions.
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