Chattanooga Magazine: ChattMag Conversations

ChattMag Conversations
With Dave Porfiri and Linda Duvoisin
Dave and Linda are the husband-and-wife team behind Mindflow Media, a film production company in Chattanooga. The two helped to start the film training program at Chattanooga State. See the full story in Chattanooga Magazine.

For those who may not be familiar with your work, what do you do?

Dave Porfiri: We’re a husband and wife filmmaking team and we have a production company called Mindflow Media. We’re documentary filmmakers, fundamentally that’s what we are, and that skill set applies really well to the corporate arena and the nonprofit arena.

That’s our main revenue source, are those corporate and nonprofit clients, but we also work a lot in network television, and that’s been a major source of revenue as well. We will contract with television networks to do anything from small segments for existing TV shows to working with National Geographic. You name the network, we’ve probably worked there at some point.

The third thing we do is develop our own projects, and that’s where the real passion is. Things that we really want to see made into films, and of course those are the hardest things to do because we have to raise the money for it, we have to go out and find sources.

What are some of those personal projects?

Linda Duvoisin: My background has always been documentary, so that’s kind of what my passion is. There are certain projects that are labors of love, why we do it, why we got into this business. One labor-of-love passion project that I have going on right now is a documentary that’s very connected to Chattanooga and Chattanooga’s history. It’s on the story of Ed Johnson and his trial and his death and the subsequent trial after that. Ed Johnson was accused of rape in 1906—he was a black man—and it’s a fascinating piece of American history, not just Chattanooga history, I think it’s nationally significant.

Read the story of Ed Johnson and the two African American lawyers from Chattanooga who appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court granted a stay of execution to hear the appeal, but a mob lynched Johnson on the Walnut Street Bridge. After his death, the local sheriff was convicted of contempt and was tried in the only criminal trial ever held in the Supreme Court to date.

DP: We’ve got some starter funding from a local foundation, which is encouraging. It’s a touchy subject, because doing the film, on its surface, casts a negative light on Chattanooga. It’s something ugly from our history here, but the way I see it is, it’s the opposite. If Chattanoogans support this film and the idea behind it, help us bring it to a national audience, which we think it deserves on American Experience on PBS—that is the pinnacle of historical filming—to me, that’s a positive thing for Chattanooga. Here is a community that is embracing its ugly past and trying to make amends for it. Part of the way you make amends is to tell the story.

LD: It’s important to talk about how these things happen in society. What saddens me, what gets me riled up, what gets me committed to the idea of this film, is Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins. They are heroes—they’re American heroes. And we need to know about them, schoolchildren need to know what they did. It’s something for Chattanoogans to be proud of.

DP: It’s one of several projects that we have in various stages of development. History is one of my favorite areas. History filmmakers know that history is an incredibly rich source of stories that haven’t been done. So many of the labor-of-love projects that we want to do are historical in nature, stories that we think should be told because of the lessons there, and how the story can be applied today.

Where do you get your ideas for a lot of these projects that you’re so passionate about?

DP: It starts with an interest. The problem is, we both have more interests than we could possibly make films in our lifetime. We literally do keep a file drawer of projects, and I separate them by projects we think are good for commercial television, projects we think are good for public television. We have dozens of ideas in both drawers.

What do you want people to gain from your work? What do you want people to see in it? What do you want to leave them with?

DP: Any filmmaker will tell you there’s a tremendous satisfaction in telling an untold story, being the first filmmaker out there to tell a story that hasn’t been told before, or to put a new spin on an old story. How that story can be told, the more skillfully we present the story, the more gratifying that is. And the more people will appreciate it, the more it will sit with people, the more people will be entertained by it. There’s no reason a documentary can’t be as entertaining as a feature film. In fact, a big part of my background is Hollywood feature-filmmaking, which I was involved with quite a bit when I lived in California. We bring a lot of that mentality to documentaries. There’s no reason we can’t bring a lot of the same storytelling that people expect when they go to see a feature film.

A sample of some of Dave and Linda's recent projects.

You lived in California and Washington, D.C. for quite a while. How did you end up in Chattanooga?

DP: We were very well established in Washington, DC. There’s a very thriving documentary and television community there. We had various reasons to leave, but more than the reasons to leave, there was a serious draw to this area. We did have some family connections here, we had a young baby and another one on the way so we were looking for a place a little bit lower cost to live than DC. But also, we saw the potential here, and still see the potential. In the five years we’ve been here we’ve been impressed. The potential to grow the film community was a serious draw for us. There are great elements in place to help be part of, from the ground up, developing a very thriving film community here. We already saw a thriving art scene, a thriving music scene.

LD: The film needs to catch up.

DP: That was definitely at the back of our minds when we moved here. We thought we could perhaps play a leadership role in the process, and we have, and we’re happy to do that. It’s just a great area to support filmmaking because of the natural resources and the cooperative atmosphere. It’s a great place for filmmakers to be based. Geographically, you’re in a very centered area for the major population centers of the Eastern U.S. And also, being artists that we are, the cost of living is a major factor.

Other artists have been hip to this. We weren’t the first, obviously. The artist scene on Main Street has been very successful in getting eople to relocate to Chattanooga. We weren’t part of that program originally. Had we known about it, maybe we’d be living on Main Street, but we came to that conclusion on our own and moved here and happened to be part of a community that just treasures the arts. We feel that film is an art form as well. There has been a film community here all along, they just haven’t been very vocal until recently.

LD: It is just so different from being in a big city. There was a great community of documentarians in DC, because there’s a lot of people living there. But it’s nice to be something kind of more grassroots that’s just starting out. There’s not that many people here doing what we do. More and more are coming every year. I think it’s really wonderful to have that community, where you can talk to other filmmakers and you can nurture the culture and bring it up. That’s kind of what we’ve tried to do. And I think it’s coming along.
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See the full story on the Chattanooga film community and the film training program at Chattanooga State Community College in the Jan/Feb issue of Chattanooga Magazine!

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