Fair to show Colony history through films

PALMER — With the Alaska State Fair celebrating its 75th anniversary, this year’s focus is on history. And if you’re looking for history, you’ll find a lot of it at the Wineck Barn by the red gate.

“It’s a great location. People come in the gate and we’re right there,” said Joan Juster, one of the producers of a pair of documentaries that show in the barn throughout the fair.

The barn is convenient for fairgoers, but also significant for Juster and her film.

“We filmed a lot of our interviews inside the Wincek Barn in 1995,” she said. “Also, we filmed an interview with Earl Wineck himself. … I interviewed him in front of that barn and so I’m hoping to show that interview in the Wineck Barn.”

One of the films, “Where the River Matanuska Flows,” is currently showing as a miniseries on KTOO. Juster says that film is four hours long, so during the fair she’ll be showing snippets.

“If people come in and say, ‘I want to see the chapter that has my grandpa in it,’ well by golly, that’s the chapter I’ll show,” she said.

But the other film, “Alaska Far Away,” will show in its entirety twice a day every day except for Sunday, Sept. 4, which is Alaska’s Native Cultures Day and during which the barn will be used for events.

Juster’s films tell the story of the Matanuska Colony, the Depression-era project that brought farmers to the Valley.

“It’s really the last great pioneer movement in America,” Juster said. “What’s astonishing about it is that it’s in the age of air travel and Hollywood movies.”

The process to make the films began in 1994 when she came up for the Colony project’s 60th anniversary. She and her production partner, Paul Hill, brought film crews to that year’s Colony reunion and shot hours and hours of interviews with Colonists.

“Once we got started we realized we should just try to get as much of this as we can,” Juster said.

The final tally? More than 90 hours of film. Which, Juster said, is a ridiculous amount for an hour-and-a-half documentary. “We went overboard and just interviewed as many people as we possibly could.”

The longer film, “Where the River Matanuska Flows,” actually came first. Juster said it was put together in 2005 for the Colony’s 70th anniversary. The Palmer Historical Society, which had by then been waiting 10 years for a film, asked if maybe there was something Juster and Hill could put together for the event.

“One of those off-the-top-of-my-head great ideas I said, ‘Well, gee, we’ve got all of these great interviews, … why don’t we put together a compilation DVD of all of these stories, it’ll be a nice keepsake for the families?’” Juster said.

As she started going through the interviews, she found there were a lot of them she just couldn’t stand to leave out, which is why the final product wound up being four hours long.

“It was never meant to be anything more than a commemorative DVD for the families, but it’s taken on a life of its own,” she said. “It showed Alaskan funders like the Rasmuson Foundation that we did indeed know how to finish a project so they came up with completion funding.”

The story of how Juster, a native of Silicon Valley and San Francisco resident, wound up producing a documentary on an Alaska agricultural project contains a lot of luck and happenstance.

Juster said she and Hill had some free airline tickets coming up and weren’t sure where to go. They wanted a place they could stay for free. A friend of theirs, a Palmer native they met in San Francisco, was living in Palmer. So they decided to go north.

Their friend, Jim Fox, was living with his grandmother, Irene Benson, at the time. Benson was a Colonist who came to Alaska as a young bride.

“She was just one of the most incredibly charming women,” Juster said. “We were fascinated with her story of this grand adventure.”

That’s when they started thinking about a film.

“Somebody has to do a documentary about this. This is a great story from American history, why have we never heard of the government relocating people to get them off relief and give them a better life,” Juster recalled. “Why should Ken Burns get all the good stories?”

Within a month she quit her job and started writing proposals for the film.

“When I look back at those first proposals that I wrote, that’s pretty much how the film turned out,” Juster said.

But people wondering if the film is just a light, breezy, feel-good story should take note — Juster said “Alaska Far Away” deals with the Colony project seriously.

“From the feedback that we’ve gotten on it so far, everyone from Colony kids to historians around the country was yeah, we’ve got it about as right as anyone is ever going to get it,” Juster said. “The families seem very satisfied, but also the teachers and professors and historians feel that we got it right as well.”

She said the film is agnostic on the question of whether the Colony project succeeded or failed. Her intent was to let viewers come to their own conclusions. And largely, she said, they have.

Those of a conservative mindset who might not cotton to such a government-sponsored project have watched the film and view the project as a failure. Those of a more liberal mindset have watched and dubbed it a success.

Taking an even-handed approach was hard, Juster said, after having spent so much time working with the Colonists and their families.

“We’ve become very close to many of them, they’ve become friends, we’ve become part of the Colony family, but we wanted to tell the good and the bad and let audiences draw their own conclusions as to the success of the Colony,” she said.

She said she hopes that the screenings will draw a crowd, and she can’t think of a better place to show the films.

The fair itself has Colony roots, she points out, since it began as a way for Colonists to show the world what kind of things Alaska’s soil can produce.

Admission is free and Juster said she plans to put up museum-style displays of photos and news clippings and quotes from the movie. The barn, she hopes, will be, at least temporarily, a Colony history exhibit and anyone with history to share is welcome to talk to her.

“If they want to bring their family photos, I’m happy to scan them for them and preserve them for the Palmer Historical Society,” Juster said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.