Cash festival symposium to be headlined by renowned filmmakers

Three renowned filmmakers will be the featured presenters for a special event hosted by Rosanne Cash on Oct. 18, as part of the 2019 Johnny Cash Heritage Festival in Dyess. These presentations will be held from 1 to 4:30 p.m. at the Dyess Community Center. Admission will be $15, with tickets available through the festival website, JohnnyCashHeritageFestival.com.

The trio announced by Cash during a trip to Little Rock Thursday (April 11) to promote the festival includes:

Pam Baucom, co-producer of the eight-part Ken Burns documentary “Country Music,” which will air on PBS during September.  Baucom will be sharing behind-the-scenes stories about the process of putting this massive eight-year project together.

Baucom has been an employee of Florentine Films, Burns’ documentary film company in Walpole, N.H., since 1993. Previous to the “Country Music” documentary, she produced, with Burns and Paul Barnes, a seven-part, 14-hour series on the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.”

During her first 16 years at Florentine Films, Baucom was Burns’ assistant and also helped with production work on award-winning films on the Lewis and Clark expedition, the life of Mark Twain, the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the history of the National Parks.

Thom Zimny, director of the feature-length documentary, “The Gift:  The Journey of Johnny Cash,” which premiered in March at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival in Austin. Zimny will discuss making the documentary, which includes much of the narration in Cash’s own voice.

Zimny is a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning artist, and the director and producer of “Springsteen On Broadway” (NETFLIX / 2018). His film, “Elvis Presley: The Searcher,” a two-part feature, premiered at SXSW and aired on HBO in 2018, receiving widespread critical acclaim.

He has previously directed and produced two feature-length documentaries chronicling key chapters in Bruce Springsteen’s recording career, winning a Grammy for “Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run,” while “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town,” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was subsequently released on HBO.

Zimny has worked with Springsteen for the past 18 years and has directed documentaries, including “Bruce Springsteen’s High Hopes” (HBO/2014) and “The Ties that Bind” (HBO/2015), the short film for High Hopes track “Hunter of Invisible Game,” co-directed with Springsteen, and several music videos. He has also helmed music videos for Bob Dylan, The Low Anthem and many others.

Zimny previously edited three seasons of the highly acclaimed HBO series by David Simon, “The Wire.” He has also served as a consulting producer on Trouper Production’s “Downloaded” (VH1/2014) and “Deep Web” (Epix/2015) and as a music consultant on HBO miniseries “Show Me a Hero.”

William Ferris, former Delta resident and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ferris just won two Grammys for Voices of Mississippi, his historic lifetime work in gathering field recordings of blues and gospel singers and storytellers.

Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His books include “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues” (2009), which was translated into French as “Les Voix du Mississippi” (2013), “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists,” and “The South in Color: A Visual Journal” (2016).

Ferris curated “I Am a Man: Civil Rights Photographs in the American South—1960-1970,” which opened in the Pavilion Populaire in Montpellier, France, in October, 2018.  His publication, “Voices of Mississippi,” is a box set published by Dust to Digital in 2018 that contains three CDs of his recordings of blues, gospel and stories, a DVD of his documentary films, and a book.