After months, even years, of 12-hour workdays, Tijah Bumgarner, associate professor for filmmaking at Marshall University, has entered post-production on her new film, “Of The Cloth.”
“Of The Cloth” is an 80-minute narrative feature film that dives into the societal roles of churches in Appalachian towns and communities that have been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. The film was shot over 10 days in Huntington.
The film features “a young pastor who gets assigned a church in a small Appalachian town,” Bumgarner said. “What happens with our main character is that he is met with the realities of what it means to work in institutionalized religion and how that begins his journey of finding who he is and what he feels what Christianity could be.”
“He finds someone who has struggles with substance abuse, and he goes back to his church, and he says, ‘What are we doing to help the community,’” Bumgarner said. “There are people in the church who are ‘not my backyard’ type of people trying to protect their community.”
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Bumgarner grew up in West Virginia and says she knows people in her life who have struggled with substance abuse, and she wants to shine light on these people and make audiences understand they are still people.
“Some people just need an extra hand in life,” Bumgarner said.
The story deals with the politics of not just religion, but within any kind of institution.
“This project came out of hearing these negative conversations about people who are having a hard time or struggling for whatever reason and hearing the conversations of people who feel like they don’t deserve help,” Bumgarner said.
“I’m always hoping that any work I make could make a small difference for these people,” Bumgarner says.
The production crew for the movie features Bumgarner, filmmaker Patrick Ward-Perkins, students and alumni of the School of Art and Design, local actors and a crew of local producers.
“How I got involved with the film was that before I graduated, Tijah entered pre-production for the movie,” said Tatyana Reynolds, Marshall graduate and crew member. “I remember her talking about what she wanted to do with the movie. A couple months down the line, she told me she wanted me to be unit production manager. It was not a hard question to answer; it was not hard to say, ‘Yes, of course.’”
Reynolds said being unit production manager involves “making sure that each other department is running smoothly. Like, making sure that camera department is good, the props and wardrobe department is okay, the lighting department is okay – just making sure that everyone is on schedule.”
“As a small indie film, each member of the crew each wears different hats, and while working 12-15 hour days, it definitely gets hard, but I would not change this experience I got for anything,” Reynolds said. “This is why I went to school to study film was for moments and opportunities like this.”
Bumgarner holds a bachelor’s in film/video from the California Institute of the Arts, a master’s in media studies from West Virginia State University and is currently pursuing her doctorate at Ohio University. Reynolds received a bachelor’s in video production from Marshall and is currently a teaching assistant at Maine Media, a higher educational institution located in Maine.
Nate Harrah can be contacted at [email protected].
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