Film chronicles death of furniture plant

Matthew Barr is drawn to the working man. And woman.

His latest documentary, With These Hands, chronicles what should be familiar to anyone who has even glanced at headlines in North Carolina and Virginia in the past 10 years -- a dying furniture factory.

Barr, a professor at UNC Greensboro and documentary filmmaker who lives in Winston-Salem, likes to tell the stories about blue-collar, working-class, ordinary folks, the kind of people whose professions are becoming an endangered species as their jobs are sent overseas or die out. Barr followed workers through the final days of the Hooker furniture plant in Martinsville, Va., an 800,000-square-foot, three-story behemoth that once employed about 600 people.

With These Hands, which was released in 2008, will be shown at the RiverRun International Film Festival this weekend.

Barr is interested in how things are made, the people who make them and the communities they create in the process.

Wild Caught, his 2006 film about the fishermen of Sneads Ferry, was screened at RiverRun in 2007. An earlier documentary, Carnival Train, is less about traditional craft but also about an older way of life and a group of people knit tight by their work. The film follows the carnies of the Strates Shows on the company's train, the only carnival still moved by train in the United States. "A big theme for me is community," Barr said. "Human community is the basic thing we have. These are the stories I want to tell."

Barr was approached by David Williams, a veteran of the furniture industry who such sold components as mirrors to furniture factories like Hooker. Williams saw Wild Caught, and he thought that Barr should do something similar with the closing factories.

Then, in January 2007, Hooker announced that it was closing its Martinsville plant, the last of its five case-goods furniture plants. Barr decided to ask the company if it would be willing to let him shoot the plant's last days. The board of directors agreed within about a day of his request. Then Barr moved fast because he knew he had just a matter of weeks.

He caught the last load of wood getting pushed into the factory on his first day of shooting. That was Feb. 12, 2007. Then, the sawdust was still flying, and the plant was still cranking out entertainment centers, cabinets and the like. A month later, most workers clocked out for the last time, walking out under an electronic sign wishing them good-bye and good luck.

"The timing of this thing, I always felt was meant to be. Here was a company that wasn't part of a conglomerate that could go ahead and say yes, go ahead and make this film. We want you to honor our workers and this company, too."

Being at the Hooker plant in the midst of production "felt like I was on a ship," Barr said. In the end, he followed that ship for months to its grave, when the workers were all gone and the plant was picked cleaned and empty for auctions, and then came back to film a rusty padlocked gate. "It took almost through the summer to really shut it down," Barr said. "It's like a death."

Barr and his wife, Cornelia, founded the nonprofit Unheard Voices Project, which collects and records the stories of working families.

With These Hands includes interviews with several workers, many of whom Barr caught up with in the months after the closing. They genuinely seemed to enjoy their jobs and co-workers, respected their former employer, and took pride in the complicated work of building a polished piece of furniture from raw wood.

Between January 2001 and September 2008, Virginia lost about 12,198 jobs in furniture production, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. North Carolina lost almost 33,000. Most were lost as companies moved out of building furniture and into importing it from third-party vendors.

The Hooker workers are almost universally resigned and realistic about their unemployment.

"I never met any workers at Hooker who were resentful of … Chinese workers or the Vietnamese, or in Malaysia, or anywhere else," Barr said.

"These issues are so complex about this fact that globalization is such an enormous thing that you really can't stop, you really can't say, ‘We're just not going to bring anything in here.' They're watching the news just like everyone else. They, more than most people, because they've been living on the front lines so to speak … all these plants closing and not many new ones starting. I think one thing that blew everybody's minds was with furniture, was wow, it suddenly hit like a storm.

"It's a very mixed bag, how this is all going to work out. We all want a bad guy here. Who is it? Is it globalization? Cheaper labor?"

■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.

There's more

• The RiverRun International Film Festival will run through Wednesday.

• With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Factory will be shown at 7:15 p.m. Saturday at the Main Theatre at UNC School of the Arts Film Village, $8, $6 for students with ID. It will be repeated at 5 p.m. Sunday, Reynolda House, 2250 Reynolda Road.

• Today's Best Bets include: Guest of Cindy Sherman, 3 p.m. UNCSA-Babcock; The Burning Plain, 7 p.m. Stevens Center, 405 W. Fourth St.; The Garden, 7 p.m. UNCSA-Gold; Sita Sings the Blues, 9:15 p.m. UNCSA-Main.

• Visit the Winston-Salem Journal's Web site, www.journalnow.com, for daily podcasts, a complete schedule, reviews of most of the films, more Best Bets, a map of venues and more.

• For tickets and more information, go to www.riverrunfilm.com.