"My Take"...

 ... once known as a"film-lecture" ... is a series of different screening presentations of films and/or clips with talks given by filmmaker, Stan Woodward, on the stories behind and contextual information about making Southern Culture and Folklife documentaries in the South - and the importance of preserving an accurate video record of the folk heritage traditions, artisans, tradition-keepers and cultural roots that are rapidly disappearing from the South.

Supported by power-point presentations, Stan takes the audience with him on the various "shoots", providing stories and information that goes beyond what we see on the screen - expanding into Southern folklife, Southern culture and placing his work in the larger context of writers and image-makers who have helped form an ethos and collective mental image of the South, in all it's compound-complex glory.

The MY TAKE video-lecture is audience-interactive, as the filmmaker makes connections between the people in the audience and their life experiences and those of the subjects in the documentaries:

"Folklife is us - you and me", says Stan, "in our social and cultural contexts: our traditions - the ones that come from family, from community groups, and from those who pass on their knowledge and skills to us with no formal training or education. This takes the form of "heritage culture" and is the pure passing-down of root culture and practices that keep them alive from generation to generation. In fact, this describes what is at the very heart of folklife.

"But the tyranny and power of an instantaneous system - a televistic monolithic overlay onto and into American life - that is motivated by making money - and lots of it - by investors wishing to sell goods and services to viewers who must be re-defined as consumers and marketed-to in increasingly niche markets covering all ages capable of and influencing the spending of money - this system, and the advent of a digital world connected worldwide by the Internet has radically changed the face of culture. How does this impact and change traditional cultures? MY TAKE sets the folklife we see in my documentaries up against the realities of this new paradigm."