Bright Leaves

This film describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and pyschological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by a native Carolian, whose great-grandfather created the famous tobacco known as Bull Durham. Bright Leaves is a subjective, autobiographical meditation on the allure of cigarettes and their troubling legacy for the state of North Carolina. It's about loss and preservation, addiction and denial. And it's also about filmmaking - home movies, documentary, and fiction filmmaking - as the filmmaker fences with the legacy of an obscure Hollywood melodrama that is purportedly based on his great-grandfather's life. Bright Leaves explores the notion of legacy - what one generation passes down to the next - and how this can be a particularly complicated topic when the legacy under discussion is a Southern one and is tied to tobacco.