Smoking, or Non?
North Carolina is the largest producer of tobacco in the United States; however, in the last two decades, cigarette condemnation has negatively affected the industry. Smoking, or Non? follows the personal stories of tobacco farmers, health care professionals and the community as a whole.
It’s daybreak in rural North Carolina. A man drives a truck down a worn dirt road, past empty dirt fields, before coming to a stop by an old steel-sheeted barn. The barn is filled to capacity with harvesting equipment, old trucks, air compressors, and tractors, all dotted with dents and rust. He gets out of the truck, holding the door open so his old mutt can stumble out onto the ground. The two of them walk across from the barn to a large greenhouse, where a thin screen door separated them from a long plain of finger-sized green plants. He and the dog walk up and down the long row down the center of the greenhouse, inspecting the seedlings one by one, making sure there aren’t any problems.
The man is a tobacco farmer, like his father before him, and his father-in-law, and his neighbor, and his neighbor’s father. He leans against his old GMC, which has clocked more than 500,000 miles while almost never making it over fifty miles per hour. He tells of how he has been working with tobacco for as long as he can remember. As soon as he was strong enough to carry a stick, he was cropping and barning tobacco. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights one up, as if to prove his point.
A young man in his twenties sits in his apartment, playing video games with his roommate. Every few minutes he takes a hit from a thinly whistling metal box, before releasing a huge plume of vapor loose on the apartment. He tells the story about how he got into using tobacco products, and how his views on tobacco culture have changed since he was younger.
I have never smoked or chewed tobacco; however growing up in close proximity to previously mentioned tobacco farmer, I feel I understand much of tobacco’s significance. I grew up playing hide-and-seek among the bales of cured tobacco leaves, and was asked to help blow-out their greenhouse on more than one occasion. In this film, I hope to explore how people of different backgrounds and age groups understand the role of tobacco in our culture, as well as how that outlook has changed over the past few decades due to persistent anti-smoking marketing. A majority of the film will be presented in the form of personal anecdotes and testimonials of the subjects, as well as the relaying of information concerning the statistical and demographical information through motion graphics.
The purpose in relating this statistical information about declines in cigarette use by people of all ages shows the audience how quickly and sharply opinions on these subjects are changing, even over a single generation. Hence the title, Smoking, or non?, which was not too long ago a common phrase heard in every restaurant across the country, yet is now obsolete.
The film will look at the use of tobacco from many perspectives, including non-smokers and former-smokers, as well as people working in the medical profession. Some of the statistical information will come from these medical professionals, but their stories will also be personal and include their own perspectives on the cultural impact of smoking and vice versa.
The film ends back on the farm. It’s late spring and the farmer begins to replant the seedlings in the fields. Crowds of migrant workers, who just finished moving in for the season, huddle around the truck to receive their day’s pay. Some of the men are veterans of the trade, but some are young, even younger than the college-aged roommates vaping in their apartment.
