‘ALASKA FAR AWAY’

MAT-SU — The story of the Matanuska Colonists familiar to many Mat-Su residents will play to a bigger audience 7 p.m. Monday when “Alaska Far Away” airs on KAKM, Anchorage public television channel 7.

It’s an effort 16 years in the making for Joan Juster of San Francisco, who, with her business partner Paul Hill, produced and directed the 90-minute documentary.

For the remaining Colonists and their families, it’s an effort that goes back to 1935 when the families left the Depression-ravaged Midwest to come to Alaska under the New Deal resettlement program.

Wayne Bouwens, 81, of Palmer, was just a youngster when he and his 10 siblings arrived in Palmer with their parents from Rhinelander, Wis. Bouwens has been one of the biggest reasons the production of “Alaska Far Away: The New Deal Pioneers of the Matanuska Colony” is making its Alaska broadcast debut next week, Juster said.

“This film could not have been made without him,” Juster said last week, visiting Palmer for the fair and to promote the documentary. “It all goes back to Wayne.”

It was Bouwens’ drive that lifted the production from a standstill in about 2003 to its eventual completion in 2008.

Juster and Hill’s company, Juster Hill Productions, hired a film editor who’d compiled a rough cut for an airing to the families in 2002.

“It was an intensely personal experience,” she said. It played at the Alaska State Fair that year to capacity-plus crowds.

But after that high was the reality they’d spent all their money to get the documentary to that point. There were no funds to hire more technical help or to promote it at film festivals.

“They’d gotten to the point they’d hit a brick wall,” said Bouwens, a retired farmer. “I just decided to take it on.”

Bouwens started knocking on doors, asking agencies and organizations to support the project. And the money started to come in. But it wasn’t until Bouwens tagged the right cohorts in Tony Pippel and Bill Allen that the fund-raising made it over the hump. With their urging, the USDA and the Rasmusen Foundation got on board. Finally, there was money to finish the project. In 2007, the final draft debuted in a private screening for Colonist families. The production was finished the next year and started showing on the fim festival circuit.

“I’m excited it’s finally getting out,” Bouwens said. “This is just another piece of history to add.”

The Colonists’ history is something Bouwens sees as helping Alaska develop.

“It opened the Valley,” he said “It opened up Anchorage. It opened up the whole Railbelt.”

Many, he said, don’t know the whole story; “Alaska Far Away” tells it.

For Juster and Bouwens, the story doesn’t only look at Alaska agriculture in the 1930s and ’40s, it is also a snapshot of agriculture in the 1990s. Juster said many of the farms they filmed in 1994 are gone now.

Despite the continued encroachment of suburbia on the farmlands of the Valley, Juster said she can sense a change in the local attitude about agriculture.

“It seems to be turning around,” Juster said. “There are more people interested in fresh, local foods. There seems to be more of a viable farm presence.”

It was the story of the Colonists related to them by Colonist grandson Jim Fox, who was living in San Francisco, that brought Juster and Hill north to start the project. With Fox and his grandmother, Irene Benson, to open doors for them, the documentary began to take shape in their minds. Juster said she is grateful to many local residents and historians who shared information and stories for the video.

“They’ve helped us understand the place and the issues involved,” she said.

There was so much material that Juster Hill Productions also packaged outtakes into another DVD, “Where the Matanuska River Flows.” Juster said it was developed as a 70th anniversary commemorative disk for the families, but has enjoyed its own following. She’s heard from a resident in Barrow that it was played there on a movie night.

“I love that is has statewide coverage,” she said.

This trip, she got word Anchorage School District is buying copies of “Alaska Far Away” for each of its schools. Outtake footage and interviews are also part of Alaska Agriculture in the Classroom’s new DVD production “Hopeful Harvest,” which charts more than 100 years of Alaska’s agriculture history.

Juster said it is important the state’s agricultural heritage is not lost.

While Alaskans have been able to watch “Alaska Far Away” at several screenings at the Alaska State Fair and other venues, the Anchorage airing Monday and an expected Fairbanks airing later this month are taking the DVD to the next level. Those airings, along with airings at various major markets around the United States, including the Midwest, may help the production go nationwide in the future, which has always been Hill and Juster’s goal, Juster said.

Next up is a companion book to go with the documentary, because, as Juster says, “Why should Ken Burns get to tell all the good stories?”

To learn more about the production, people may visit alaskafaraway.com.