Residents from the Sitka Pioneer Home are featured in a micro-documentary film project

The Sitka based documentary film project, 14 Miles, recently stopped by the Sitka Pioneer Home to spend time with some of the elders there and asked them to reflect on their lives. Many questions were discussed including what does it mean to ask people who they are, rather than just what they’ve lived through? What moments define a life? How do you bear witness to the complexity that people were and still are? How multi-generational is the community that you interact with daily? How often do people think of age as a form of diversity?

View the micro-documentary 14 Miles: Love, Uncertainty and Belonging here.

This episode features Sitka Pioneer Home elders Galen Insteness, Alberta Hemnes, Nancy Ricketts, Jack Hermle, Betty Decicco, Mary Miller Shaaxhaatk’i, and Joe Griffin.

For more information and additional episodes, check out 14 Miles’ website.

14 Miles is a documentary film project set in Sitka, Alaska, on an island in the panhandle of Southeast Alaska. It is a town of fewer than 9,000 people surrounded by mountains and ocean. While the distance from one end of Sitka to the other is not long (14.3 miles to be precise), the potential to engage people in creating a series of micro-documentaries about place and identity is abundant. The goal of the film project is to address what Alaskans share in common and what divides us, as well as what makes us proud to live in Alaska.