Logline: Farmersville, a small town within the Central Valley, was once the subject of the Farmersville Film Project, a series of films made in the 1960s meant as an initiative by the government aimed at supporting social progress. This documentary returns to the town with open questions rather than expectations, exploring how the community’s present compares with the expectations of voices from its past.

Overview: By the late 1960s, Farmersville was a growing community sorting out it’s identity and grappling with the needs of its historically underserved people. This is when the Farmersville Film Project crew arrived. The Farmersville Film Project, funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, modeled on the National Film Board of Canada’s Film and Community Development Workshop, sought to use film as a tool for community communication and social progress. Director Henry Lanford, who was involved with Canada’s workshop, spent six weeks with his crew in Farmersville between 1968 and 1969, producing 11 short documentaries capturing the state of the town at this time. Lanford was skeptical of the production’s success due to the crew consisting of nothing but outsiders.The Office of Economic Opportunity has thus been disbanded under Reagan and since then these films have been forgotten and lost in corners of the internet and public libraries. This film returns to Farmersville to pick up these buried conversations and ask what happened, and why?

Our goal is to raise funds to cover the production costs of the documentary, including travel, filming, editing, and marketing.