About the Film
Remembering is an oral history of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Fauquier County, Virginia. Filmmaker Tom Davenport was inspired by The Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems by Egar Lee Masters that was standard fare in high school American literature classes in the 1950s.
The storytellers are masters. All are members of the congregation from the old farming community tradition of Fauquier County. The stories, funny, sad, scandalous,and loving, are memories of friends and family who are dead and buried in the churchyard.
The film was made to bridge the gap between the newcomers and the older rural roots of the congregation. In many churches there is a chasm of time and change between the new commuter economy and the older agricultural society, and in some congregations there is no longer living memory of any of the previous members who sustained the church that now nourishes them.
