Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 1, 1994 TAG: 9407010059
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was even steamier than the boys from London's Worldview Pictures had expected. A windstorm knocked out power to the Hill City for days. After long days of shooting, they nursed their film canisters in a cooler and themselves, drinks in hand, in the motel pool.
Their mission was to tell the world what happened during 50 years at the old Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Madison Heights, just over the James River from Lynchburg and now called the Central Virginia Training Center. For weeks, they interviewed people in Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Richmond and Amherst.
Thousands of people, most of them poor and uneducated, were forcibly sterilized at the colony until Virginia's eugenics law was repealed in the 1970s.
That statute, later mimicked by the Nazis for their own sterilization act, aimed to neuter people thought to be genetically inferior. It wound up targeting mentally able orphans, epileptics, juvenile delinquents, people with crossed eyes or club feet - and many unwanted children.
Virginia's sterilization law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and helped lead to the forced sterilizations of at least 60,000 people around the country.
On Saturday night ``The Lynchburg Story'' will be shown on U.S. television for the first time. The Discovery Journal Special airs at 10 on the Discovery Channel. The show repeats Sunday morning at 1; next Saturday at 5 p.m.; and Sunday, July 10, at 2 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Two Lynchburg residents appear in the film - Mary Frances Corbin Donald, now 59 and sterilized when she was 11; and 71-year-old Jesse Frank Meadows, sterilized at 17. Both were were sterilized at the colony in the 1940s.
Until now, their stories and faces have been better-known in Great Britain and France than in their own country or even in Virginia.
The film aired on French and British television last February - in France, under the title ``Les Enfants Perdus,'' or ``The Lost Children.'' French and English reviewers called the movie "mind-blowing'' and among the best documentaries on television.
``This film disturbs with its revelations and leaves one with a profound sense of unease at the reluctance of Virginia authorities to take responsibility for what they have done. The survivors have kept silent for years - isolated and damaged - their memories kept secret, like shameful nightmares,'' said a reviewer for the French publication Telerama. ``Today they are speaking out.''
The documentary recently won awards at the San Francisco Film Festival and the Banff Television Festival. Director Trombley and producer Eadie were invited to screen the movie at the Montreal World Film Festival this year.
Trombley's other documentaries include ``The Execution Protocol,'' a profile of a death-penalty prison in Missouri that kills inmates by lethal injection, and ``The Battle for Stone Bassett, a film that helped prevent the building of a private new town on 2,000 acres of working farmland in Oxfordshire.
In 1990, Trombley produced and directed ``Caffe Lena,'' a performance documentary featuring Arlo Guthrie and Spalding Gray, for the PBS network and the BBC.
His many books include ``The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization'' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson , London, 1988) and biographies of author Virginia Woolf and Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon who treated and tried to help John Merrick, the Elephant Man.
Trombley and Eadie's next documentary is about a concentration camp in Paris from which 70,000 French and foreign Jews were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Only 3,000 survived. ``Drancy: A Concentration Camp in Paris 1941-1944'' is due for release this summer.
Asked last year what the common denominator was in all his work, Trombley said it was how society and our governments treat people who are devalued or considered different from the masses of us.
Mary Bishop located and interviewed Mary Donald and Jesse Meadows while on a search for eugenics survivors a few years ago and introduced them to the filmmakers. Bishop, who also appears in the film, is continuing to search for survivors of Virginia's mass sterilizations and wants to write a book about them.
by CNB