| Summary: | Soros Documentary Fund
The film investigates the burning of two African American churches in rural South Carolina by Timothy Welch, a young convert to the Ku Klux Klan. Told through remarkably frank interviews with both the victims and the perpetrators of these racial crimes, the film puts a surprisingly human face on racism, transforming a seemingly simple story of blacks and whites into a complex tale filled with endless shades of gray. Filmed over a one-year period, “Forgotten Fires” examines the historical, economic, and social contexts to the epidemic of church burnings in the 1990s. Interweaving Ku Klux Klan home movies, informative historical footage, and confessional testimony, the film traces the coming of the Klan to this sleepy rural town and shows how the group's twisted logic of racial enmity found fertile ground among the region's poor. What begins as an investigation into the church burnings becomes a meditation on race relations in America.
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