What Is a Heritage Film?

A Heritage Film is a personal documentary film about someone in your family, one to two hours long, professional in every respect, but about you.

People ask me this all the time. We’re talking about baseball, Marvel movies, politics, ya know normal stuff, and they’ll ask: “What exactly is it that you do?”

I work in adult film.

Heritage Films. I am the Boomer Whisperer.

“So… like a family video?”

Not exactly.

A family video is wonderful. A birthday party, a graduation, a reunion where someone’s kid is crying in the background and everyone’s a little sunburned. These things are real and irreplaceable. I’m not here to say otherwise. But they’re ephemeral.

But my Heritage Films start with a different question.

Most cameras point at the event. We point at the person behind all of it.

A family video captures what happened. A Heritage Films captures who was there and what that person actually was, underneath everything that happened. We focus on the how’s and why’s. The what’s, when’s and who’s come along naturally.

We sit down and we talk. Not for thirty minutes. For hours…days sometimes. We go back to the beginning. Before the beginning. I had a guy who had his paternal lineage back to freaking 1066. Like William the Conqueror. We ask about the house they grew up in, the parents they came from, the year everything changed. We ask about the work. The marriage. The failure they never told anyone about. The thing they believed in when nothing else was holding. The thing they survived. Ya know. coffee talk.

Then we build a film.

It’s not an interview. It’s closer to an excavation that feels like a chitchat. Most subjects tell us, somewhere around hour two, that they’ve never talked about some of this. Not with their spouse, not with their kids, not with anyone. Maybe because it signals that this matters. That someone actually wanted to know.

The film we make from that conversation is not a highlight reel. It’s a portrait. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that’s not an end because they have tomorrow. It has a structure and a story. And it has that person’s voice, not summarized, not paraphrased, not softened, actually in it. The way they laugh. The long pause before they answer a hard question. The look on their face when they talk about their father. The same damn story about the boots you’ve heard a million times. Trust me there will come a day when you want to hear it again.

We’ve traveled all over the country to make these films. Not just Texas, though we’re proud of our Texas roots. Actually I gotta get in the habit of saying all over the world. Four countries and counting. The subject doesn’t need to be famous. They don’t need to be remarkable in any way the world would recognize. They just need to have lived. And most people who have really lived have more story than they know what to do with.

The families who commission these films almost always say the same thing when they watch the finished version:

“I didn’t know that about them.”

Sometimes the subjects say it too. “I didn’t know anyone would want to hear that.”

That’s the gap we’re filling. Not between the camera and the person, but between a person and the people who love them who never quite found the words to ask the right questions.

We ask them. Then we keep the answers in a form that doesn’t fade, doesn’t get corrupted, and doesn’t require anyone to remember to back it up.

Your family may already have the birthday video. The graduation video. The Christmas-morning-in-matching-pajamas video.

This is the other thing.