Film still from Gravel (2002) [Enlarge in New Window]

Steven Bognar: Gravel

In the story of our lives, says filmmaker Steven Bognar, "one thing that creates chapters is geography. When you go someplace new, a new chapter begins."

For many, that chapter began when America crossed the Ohio River, located some 50 miles south of Bognar's home in Dayton. Marking the Mason-Dixon line, the Ohio River once offered slaves passage to a better life. Later it lured generations of Appalachian folk, driven north by poverty to seek jobs in Cincinnati, Dayton, and other urban centers of the Midwest.

This geography and the heritage of urban Appalachia form the backdrop for Bognar's Gravel, a 15-minute short that revolves around a mother-daughter road trip. The mother, a social worker, asks her teenage daughter to accompany her on a quasi-date -- a three-hour drive to visit a former inmate on whom she has a crush. At turns helpful and resentful, the daughter comes along, bringing her camera, a friend, and memories of her recently deceased grandmother, who made a far more difficult trip when she journeyed alone from Kentucky to the big city with its factories and time cards.

In Bognar's hands, this film is not just about plot. It's also about geography, displacement, memory, photography, and how they all intersect. And it's about trolley cars that shoot sparks, weathered signage by old shopping plazas, red-brick architecture, and tall grass bordering one-lane highways. Such places are "hard-scrabble, weathered -- just like the people keeping on," says Bognar. "But it's beautiful, that kind of dogged resilience. The characters in the movie hopefully reflect that same kind of spirit."

The fact that the daughter is a budding photographer speaks to Bognar's attraction to the medium. "There's something about the connection between photographs and memory that is totally fascinating, and I can't seem to shake it. I'm interested in how memory works, how photos trigger memory, construct memory, or rewrite memory in some cases. The third element is loss - how they relate to losing things."

These themes figured strongly in Bognar's debut film, the highly lauded Personal Belongings, a documentary about his Hungarian father's life in America and his visit home after 30 years. "For my father, who couldn't go back to Hungary for so many years, the images he carried with him in a sense constructed his memory of his homeland." When the border police temporarily confiscated all the footage Bognar had shot of his father's trip, Personal Belongings ran headlong into that nexus of photography, memory, and narrative -- and became all the more fascinating for it.

Personal Belongings, which took 10 years to complete, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on PBS's series P.O.V. in 1996. The next year Bognar embarked on three major projects simultaneously. He coproduced Ed Radtke's Dream Catcher, a road movie about two troubled teens in search of family and identity. He was also one of four filmmakers invited by the Wexner Center to follow a group of students at Ohio State University throughout their four-year term for The Class of 2001. And coproducing and codirecting with his partner Julia Reichert, Bognar launched his most ambitious project to date: A Lion in the House, a multi-part documentary on children with cancer.

It all began with a call out of the blue. A Cincinnati pediatric oncologist had seen the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams and thought the struggle his patients faced could make an equally compelling film. A local film critic had just seen Personal Belongings and recommended Bognar. The doctor "had no clue that we have a kid who had just gone through cancer treatment," Bognar says. So after weathering a "hellacious" year of their own, the filmmaking duo went back into the hospital world to follow five families and gather over 450 hours of footage.

They're currently whittling this material down to a three-part series for public television. To sustain himself during the long marathon, Bognar gets periodic energy boosts from films like Picture Day (2000), a pixellated short of 600 kids discussing 'what photography means to me,' or Gravel, which gave him a chance to work with actors. "You see," he confesses, "making short projects in the middle of a big multi-year series is one way to not go crazy."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > 2001