I called an audible last week on the making of my film, Making It Rain. It was largely because the funding has not materialized from the locals around Klamath County, and I am now turning my sights to grant funding to make this film a reality.
Many of the grant funding cycles for films don't even become available until the fall, and the story I was hoping to tell seems to be just ramping up. So extending the shooting schedule until the fall, winter and springtime to tell the story of the farmers makes a lot more sense.
It is my hope to catch the after season blues, when the farmers presumably will have to make some tough choices about the year ahead. Maybe have a visit over the winter to see where their heads are at for the next growing season and then see how the snow fall in the mountains buoys the hopes for Spring when the BOR says that reduced water flows are the new normal. It doesn't seem like farming will get any easier next year.
That's why it was my surprise that the funding for this project didn't really appear from the locals. It's the locals, like the water districts, that need this story told, and it's just getting harder and harder to be a basin farmer. I had hoped we might all pull together.
Extending this film schedule out to the year ahead will also make for some difficult decisions on my part. My captain's license is up in the Spring and quite frankly between the deserts of Utah and now the high deserts of Oregon, and my return to journalism, my life has made it quite hard to maintain my license in terms of sea time. Oh, that the feds didn't shut down the navigability of the river last century, I could have a job and make a movie, but alas it wasn't so.
But it's when the darkest clouds seem to build and the prospect of failure seems to the greatest that God intercedes, I guess.
Today, the roles of donors who have chipped in got a little more diverse. It was the middle of the day and as far from my thoughts that it could possibly be from GoFundMe, that one donor hopped online and contributed that made my day.
It truly is up to the community to build the future, and up until today it was all farmers that seemed to contribute. It seemed it was the farmers who saw this project was valuable and until today with this latest donation, while nothing massive, shook mountains and parted seas.
Rejeana Jackson, candidate for Klamath County Commissioner and party chair for the Republican party here in Klamath County, contributed to the film. Her contribution I think made a statement more about how we all need to work together to see this battle for water won, and gave me a resounding endorsement for my efforts to do what I can to help the farmers see tomorrow.
It also I think proved a very valuable lesson about presupposing someone's politics. If Ive heard it once, I heard it a dozen times, my work at My Basin proved I was a liberal and I couldn't be trusted to tell the story of the Klamath Farmers.
I am no more a liberal or a biased journalist than anyone else, and if you ask any of the leaders of this community, Klamath County was a lot better off when it had an actual journalist reporting on the events of the day. I can tell a story better than most, and in truth you'll never know who I vote for or how my political stripes are painted on because it doesn't matter.
I am a talented journalist fighting to tell the story of how the Klamath Farmer has been railroaded by the politics of the federal government and how they are losing their livelihood. It doesn't matter who I vote for or how I lean politically because to tell this story and see the pain in losing one's culture, all you have to be is human.
And I think that is what motivated Ms. Jackson to donate today, and it is what I hope will motivate grant makers and local businesses and locals around the basin to contribute and make this film a reality.
We all need to work together to beat back the political winds blowing our farmers out of business, and it's not about how we vote, it's about helping our neighbor.
Thank you Ms. Jackson for your support of this project
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