Surviving Cliffside was very well-received at its World Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It is a very personal film in which director Jon Matthews profiles his cousin E.J. and his family in a small rural West Virginia town of Cliffside where he himself grew up. The film is an intimate portrait of a family struggling with health issues, drug addiction and still finding a way to muddle through. The parents are trying their best to give their 2 young daughters opportunities that they never had through competition in beauty pageants. This is the type of rare film that shows what life is like in the forgotten parts of America that have been left behind by deindustrialization and corporate abuse. Jobs in this town were once linked Union Carbide, but after they left the town its inhabitants were left to struggle with all of the plagues of poverty – lack of education, widespread drug use, cancer clusters linked to chemical contamination. Recently, this same area was affected by a chemical spill that made the water too dangerous to drink. In 1960, the Kennedy campaign came to West Virginia and promised to save Appalachia from poverty, but somehow all the efforts of War on Poverty haven't done much to transform West Virginia. The good people of West Virginia deserve better. This is an eloquent film about life in this area and I hope that it gets some distribution so that more people can connect to these very much forgotten Americans in a small part of this vast country.
