A short documentary about life in the Salinas Valley premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. KAZU’s Elena Neale-Sacks spoke with filmmakers Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck and Robert Machoian about their film, The Long Valley.
The two friends have collaborated on multiple previous films. Ojeda-Beck was living in Monterey when he first had the idea to do a film about the Salinas Valley. Machoian had to warm up to the idea.
The following conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Robert Machoian: It took me a little while because it's, like, where I grew up, but I'm also really protective about the people there. Because the dialog in the media is very one-dimensional, and they're very multidimensional people and they're very beautiful. And so it took me a while to be like, how are we approaching this?
Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck: It's not like we wanted to make a movie about X, Y, or Z, but more driving around the area and observing the landscape and kind of meeting people and interviewing them and finding connections between those observations of the space and also the kind of knowledge our participants were giving us throughout the film.
Elena Neale-Sacks: There's a scene about halfway through that really struck me, where a man is talking about how certain songs remind him of his wife and daughter who aren't in the U.S. and he gets choked up. I'm just wondering if you could talk a bit about, like, how that scene came to be and why you chose to include it.
ROB: So I got to meet that person through a former student at [Cal State Monterey Bay], who's a former student of mine. He’s an alumni from the university, and that was one of his friends. And so we went in to document him as a mixed martial artist, actually. And so that's how the conversation started. But I'm always trying to be open to where something starts, but more interested in where it goes. So throughout that interview, some of these themes started coming up and the idea of him being separated from his wife and child and this idea of like, he will continue to try, it's just a matter of waiting. And that seemed really congruent with what a lot of other people were saying in terms of time.
ENS: Yeah, could you just talk a little bit about the role that time plays as a theme?
ROB: We got our first interview, who also happens to be the first kind of participant in the film. And he shared this line that time is like the wind—you don't see it, but you feel it. And for me, hearing that kind of line really made me rethink about a lot of the footage we were capturing, because what a lot of it was, was the wind. And we're holding shots, I think, a lot longer than most films. So we're also visualizing time both in kind of this metaphorical tier of, you know, time as wind, but then also literally making an audience look at a shot for a specific amount of time and hopefully having them look deeper into the composition.
ENS: What are the primary emotions that the film conjures for both of you?
RM: For me, it was really interesting because, you know, when you grow up in a small town, you're like, supposed to leave. It's almost the same kind of experience when you move out of the home you grew up in. It's like there's this need for conflict with your parents to allow the leaving to happen in a way that you're almost like, good riddance, you know, kind of a thing, even though you love your parents. And it was kind of like that in a way in King City. It's like, because the people are amazing there, you have to, like, conjure those negative feelings so you can break from it so you don't stay there so that you can grow. What the documentary process required me to do was process the beauty of where I lived. And, like, become very aware that, like, this is the culture that I grew up in and I feel most comfortable with. And these are the people that defined me and, like, my own moral compass comes from this community. So it was really emotional, even the first cut, because it's like watching myself, in a way, because this is, like, me. Like, this place is me.
ROB: For Robert, it was this idea of coming back. And then while we were shooting, you know, I got this tenure track job at Sac[ramento] State [University]. So for me, it became this film about leaving. So it was kind of interesting, just kind of building off what Robert was saying about this sweetness of maybe reconnecting with this place you loved. And for me, coming to terms with saying goodbye.
