By Ed Tiley, Publisher - Franklin County Connection

Richard Bickel, Helen Spohrer, Jane Atkins, Sammy Tedder, and Elam Stoltzfus take a moment to gather at the reception held at the Tin Shed for the premiere of The Apalachicola River; An American Treasure.

Saturday night, April 15th, the movers and shakers and ordinary folks of Franklin County descended on the Dixie Theatre for a premiere showing of Elam Stoltzfus’ new film, The Apalachicola River; An American Treasure. Combined with a soiree at the Tin Shed, it made for an evening of fun and reflection on the future of the Apalachicola basin.

Stoltzfus, whose previous works include the PBS special, Visions of Florida; Jewel of the Everglades, Moments with Clyde Butcher, Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, and Living Waters: Aquatic Preserves of Florida, is a highly renowned maker of nature documentaries.

In addition to a number of State grants, our own Prudential Resort Realty in the persons of Helen and John Spohrer is a major sponsor of the documentary. Helen’s introduction of the film Saturday night at the Dixie Theatre was an eloquent statement about the need to keep the ecological wonders of this area intact as it grows. The originally scheduled premiere became three showings on Saturday night, as guests were shown the film and treated to fresh local seafood delights on the grounds of the Tin Shed by Harry Arnold and “The Cooking Crew.”

As one of the additional features on the DVD, Forgotten Coast TV has created a “making of” documentary of the documentary narrated by Margaret Oehlert who teaches at the Charter School, and has appeared in several Panhandle Players productions as an actress, as well as playing the title role in the Lone Wolf Productions recent dinner theatre presentation of “Mary, Mary.” In this look at the making of the documentary, producer/director Royce Rolstadt examines the passions and the meticulous care that each of the featured artists brought to this film.

In this current documentary Stoltzfus engages and incorporates the considerable talents of Sammy Tedder (whose incredible music was a large part of the Living Waters project), nature photographer Clyde Butcher (sometimes referred to as the Ansel Adams of Florida), photojournalist and conservationist Richard Bickel (whose photos of Franklin County have long stirred the souls of visitors and locals alike), and Jane Atkins who has spent the last couple of decades plying the entertainment waters making her living writing television scripts and working as an actress.

Each of these talented individuals has gifted the film with an incredible degree of authenticity and urgency to find a solution to the threats our area increasingly face from development at home and the faceless hordes upstream who don’t care what happens down here so long as their short term needs are met.

In a single hour The Apalachicola River; An American Treasure brings together all the threads that threaten the river, and its estuaries and its very existence as one of the most productive estuary systems in the world.

The film begins with a short history lesson disguised as childhood imagination encountering early Native Americans and Spanish settlers, and comes rapidly to a rolling boil in the present day. The water wars, dredging, commercial fishing, the effects of Hurricane Dennis an encroaching land use issues on the local population, rampant thoughtless development, the remediation of the ecological practices of a less enlightened age, and conservation management are just a sampling of the topics that writer Atkins and director Stoltzfus manage to tightly weave into a not so simple but well told story.

As an adjunct to that story Clyde Butcher and Richard Bickel, each in his own way, serve to document the present condition of the nature and people of the region. Butcher with his large format camera equipped with wide angle lenses, and Bickel with his intimate portraits of the men and women who work the water for a living, both manage to capture the spirit of the land and its people in a way to deepen the understanding of what is in danger of being lost forever. Both artists have created some really great photographs that document the nature of the area along the Apalachicola River. Each has had those images woven into a musical and narrative landscape and presented on the DVD as additional features as well.

You just can’t say enough about the soundtrack music composed and performed by Sammy Tedder. Tedder composes his score against an audio backdrop of natural sound recorded in the wild. Through the miracle of overdubbing, Tedder manages to play almost all the instruments heard, including the river cane flutes he meticulously constructs by hand from cane growing along the banks of the Apalachicola River.

Everyone even remotely interested in the Forgotten Coast should see this film. Hopefully, that will become possible as Stoltzfus is actively working to have this film distributed and possibly featured on PBS.

If, as the old saying goes, the past is prolog, then this film will garner all kinds of attention and awards, and will become a force to be reckoned with as the debates over the future of the Forgotten Coast rage on for the next couple of decades.