Lisa Kennedy In “Silver Dollar Road,” documentarian Raoul Peck foregrounds two resolute women, Mamie Reels Ellison and Kim Renee Duhon — the heir of a deceased landowner and her niece — to tell a story of familial grit, land grabs and the failings, if not the outright biases, of the courts. “Going to the water for me was always magical,” Ellison says early in the film, reminiscing about the pier and beach at one end of the family’s 65 acres in Carteret County, N.C.
A montage of home movie footage and photo stills of children splashing, teens striking poses and adults having a fine time captures the warmth of the place.
It was, says Duhon, recalling her summertime visits from Louisiana, “a place of freedom.” Freedom figures into the story of how Ellison’s grandfather, Elijah Reels, came to own so much land off Adams Creek.
And Peck makes effective use of the broader history of land grants as well as dispossession from that land in the film’s handsome intertitles.
Read more on variety.com