By Patty Huston-Holm
The stories Ben Knight tells are as old as time and as new as tomorrow.
True narratives, woven into film, are about greed and cultural disregard – the kind that drives people to destroy fish, rivers and local jobs for buried gold and copper.
They are tales around building dams in the name of hydropower generation and recreation with indifference to nature. Then, there is the relationship of man and dog and also man to a unique, seemingly outdated way of living.
These messages are woven into films such as “DamNation,” “Red Gold,” “The Last Honey Hunter” and “Denali” with credits listing Ocracoke Islander Knight as director, editor and cinematographer.
Many who see his films label him an activist. The title he prefers is “storyteller.”
“I feel a bit shy about capturing people’s images and words; it’s a vulnerable thing” he said. “But it’s them who really make these stories shine.”
Knight’s candor about his own life – high-school dropout, social awkwardness, husband to a woman who broke her engagement to another guy for him, etc. – is likely part of his charm with capturing honesty from those he interviews for film.
As he spoke on a spring day, Knight, 47, shared his wish for some anonymity on Ocracoke Island, where he and his wife, Margaret, and four-year-old daughter moved in 2023: The story should be less on him and more on lessons embedded in his films.
A career turning point for Knight, director and co-founder of Felt Soul Media, was the 2008 release of “Red Gold,” a 54-minute film about big mining conglomerates proposing a massive open pit mine to extract gold and copper at the headwaters of one of the world’s richest salmon stream in Bristol Bay, Alaska.
Sponsored by the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, Knight and a friend, Travis Rummel, created a documentary about how companies talk about extracting deposits worth as much as $600 billion while native fishermen protest on behalf of their subsistence way of life and wildlife, namely salmon.
“When we premiered it at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado, everyone was crying,” Knight recalled. “There was a standing ovation and that was when we realized a big responsibility in the films that we make. After you make something that matters, it’s hard to go back.”
After “Red Gold” got more than a dozen awards (best environmental film, etc.) from the film industry, it was picked up and shared through channels like FRONTLINE, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary series.
Knight screened “Red Gold” during Earth Week on Ocracoke in April.
“DamNation,” a 90-minute documentary released in the spring of 2014, had a similar theme
that pits America’s fascination with big dams and hydropower against a lesser-known impact that the cement barriers have on the life and health of rivers.
On one side are the advocates for what they say is the value of irrigation, electricity and recreation connected to the United States’ 91,000 dams.
On the other side are the voices of fishermen and environmental activists speaking for livelihoods and the fish that rely on free-flowing rivers.
Dams, they say, can directly or indirectly be responsible for loss of spawning habitat, species extinction, and sedimentation.
“DamNation,” funded by the Patagonia clothing company, focuses on the four dams on Washington state’s lower Snake River. Some voices speaking out for dam removal belong to Native Americans with generations of respect for and living off salmon.
Part of the film shows the demolition of the Condit Dam, restoring Washington’s White Salmon River ecosystem and the fish business that supported the Klickitat tribe for 1,000 years.
“You can’t make a film about dams without showing one explode, and we knew the film had to have emotional impact,” Knight said.
To get that, he filmed from a camouflaged location, waiting 18 hours for crews to dynamite a tunnel in a lower portion of the dam.
Inspired by Earth First activists and protestors in the 1980s, Knight and Rummel end the film by painting a 200-foot dotted line with a pair of scissors on the face of the defunct Matilija Dam on California’s Ventura River.
DamNation premiered at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas, and was featured on Netflix for two years.
Knight likewise took a risk to capture footage for “The Last Honey Hunter,” a collaboration project focused on a Kulung man named Maule Dhan Rai who climbed in the Himalayan Mountains to collect a rare honey with reported health and hallucinogenic properties.
With only his airfare funded, Knight joined a small team of producers and videographers to live in tents and capture the story for National Geographic and another non-profit focused on isolated subsistence farming in Nepal.
“The Last Honey Hunter,” which qualified for a short film Oscar in 2019 and garnered a half dozen other film awards, required the crew to be on site for a month of rugged living with bouts of dysentery followed by a year of editing with the help of a language translator.
“There was no money in it,” Knight said. “But it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with a rare chance to produce something respecting a culture and witnessing the drive of one man.”
“Denali,” a short film about a young man and his dog who both went through cancer together went surprisingly viral in 2015.
Knight, a native of Chapel Hill, has had an interest in photography since age 13 when he acquired a camera to shoot skateboarding that he and friends did. Some of his photos were published in skateboarding magazines.
“I think I really needed that little confidence boost, because the tradition path of school just wasn’t for me,” he said.
In the middle of his high-school senior year, he loaded up his car and headed west, spending most of his life in southwest Colorado.
“The mountains were the medicine I needed,” Knight recalled. “North Carolina felt kind of claustrophobic after dropping out.”
A Telluride newspaper editor offered Knight a photography job.
“Having to come up with a cover photo for a daily newspaper every day for a decade was better than any college experience,” he said. “I loved that challenge of trying to tell a story in one photograph.”
One such photo was published in the New York Times in 2002.
It shows a pastor — a large man wearing a shirt with dragons and dark glasses — and a young boy, standing next to a small Utah church sign that reads: “This Earth is the only hell Christians will know.”
“I believe the context of the message had to do with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center,” Knight said.
Knight shifted to filmmaking in 2005 after experiencing the impact of documentary films while volunteering at Mountainfilm.
“I saw and felt the energy that would build in a room during a presentation or a film. I was just like, oh my God, this is incredible,” he said. “I’d experienced the way one photograph
can make change, but to feel a whole audience reacting to the power of a documentary… I just couldn’t believe it.”
Knight, then in his early 20s, started “dabbling” with a friend’s borrowed video camera and the early iMovie program on Mac computers. He and the friend started recording their fly-fishing ventures while juggling their day jobs until their film work began getting attention.
One of Knight’s dreams is to find a film to make in Eastern North Carolina that he can spend years tinkering on.
“The real beauty of this work is the people I meet along the way — the folks who put their trust in me to tell their story,” he said.
As a husband and father now, he feels it’s time to tone down the adventure and spend less time on the road – something made easier with recent work that requires editing he can do from home.
Knight recently finished his latest film, “Best Day Ever,” about quadriplegic and paraplegic mountain bikers who are building a “first-of-its-kind” fully adaptive trail network in Vermont.
Knight is the cinematographer, editor and co-director.
“I feel ridiculously lucky,” he said about his work. “I’ve never even had a resume. I’ve never had to beg for work. Every time I get a little worried about paying the bills, something tends to come along. I just want to do projects that matter and raise my daughter in this extraordinary community.”
I highly recommend Ben’s documentaries featured in this story. When I viewed and listened, they were game changers for my perspective, especially increasing my awareness about dams.
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