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SALT LAKE CITY — It’s probably a rare thing for a filmmaker to be captured by a project in the same way he hopes to capture his audience. But for Kohl Glass, local writer, director and member of the team behind the regional-Emmy-winning episode of “The Generations Project,” that’s exactly what happened.
Recently Glass, along with several colleagues from MirrorLakes Films, received a Rocky Mountain Emmy for their work on an episode of “The Generations Project,” a byutv series that ran for three seasons, examining the personal trials of today through the eyes of ancestors who endured similar experiences.
“Chantelle Squires and Manju Varghese of MirrorLake Films approached me about doing ‘The Generations Project,’ ” Glass said, “but I had never written documentary. I didn’t even know how you write documentary. I had written screenplays and directed, but I had never done non-fiction. But they worked with me and sadly enough, our episode, the one that won the Emmy, was the last episode for TGP.”
In the episode Glass collaborated on, a mother, Natalie, tries to find the necessary “fight” to continue raising three energetic children after losing her fourth son to illness. Genealogists act as guides to Natalie as she explores libraries, courthouses and universities searching for answers within the stories of her family tree. As the journey narrows in on two specific and very different characters, Natalie begins to write a story of her own.
“We found two of Natalie’s ancestors,” Glass explained. “The first one, Elmira Cadwell Adams, was like a total downer story. She lost children, she got divorced, she was in the poorhouse, they didn’t even know where she was buried, and the family had reported her dead like 20 years before she passed away. The second ancestor was Lucy, a woman who is like a celebrity up in Logan, who lived to be 100 and everybody loved her."
In the episode, Natalie finds hope in Lucy’s courage, but Glass said that as a writer, he attached to Elmira.
“This Lucy in Logan, everybody loves her. She isn’t being forgotten. But Elmira, no one knew about her. But now there’s a TV show, and her story isn’t forgotten anymore. I hope she’s happy with that. The fact that we were able to do something like that, for someone people would never know, 175 years later people are going to where they think she’s buried and they’re talking about her.”
Glass, who wrote and directed “Der Ostwind,” BYU’s first film to be part of the Sundance Film Festival, has shifted his focus to fantasy and science fiction projects since his experience with TGP. Currently, he is working post production on “Orc Wars,” a fantasy film he directed and helped write, and he continues to push forward with pre-production on “Red Coat,” a Mars-based film that he hopes to shoot soon in southern Utah.
But while current projects may be worlds away from something as down-to-earth as TGP, Glass hopes to continue telling stories like Natalie’s.
“I’m very proud of the episode,” he said. “For me, the genealogy touched me as I could see it touch Natalie. I felt the journey we took with Natalie was a truly heartfelt one.”
You can contact Travis at TSPoppleton@gmail.com.
