Actor's film shows off family history

"I truly love playing heroes. Especially when it's true," says the veteran stage and screen actor. Felder, of sturdy build and formidable gaze, has invested his career in bringing all manner of characters to life, though in movies and TV he has been cast as the heavy or tough guy as often as not.

In "All For Liberty," a featured entry in the second Charleston International Film Festival, the Lowcountry-based performer wears a noble mantle, starring as

Swiss-German Revolutionary War stalwart Henry Felder of South Carolina.

Five years in the making, "All For Liberty" was shot by Felder, Weatherhead and director of photography Nick Smith in 32 locations over eight Palmetto State counties, with additional footage at Fort King George near Darien, Ga. Apart from its sizable cast and crew, the production deployed as many as 30 separate groups of historical re-enactors, dominated by the New Acquisition Militia of Brownsville, N.Y., and the Charleston 64th (portraying a British unit).

"The most satisfying thing for me? That I didn't jump off a building during production," says Weatherhead, who co-wrote the script with editor Ron Mangravite and stars as Felder's equally staunch wife. "All my creative choices had been made. I just had to stay with it. But when a story has to do with your own family, there is an added degree of pressure. (The project) had stopped and seemed hopeless at so many points that I'm grateful it actually got finished. Everything I'd ever done in entertainment prepared me to do this."

The revelation

If not for a stroke of serendipity, Felder might not even have learned of his forebear.

"I received an e-mail one day from a Felder who said 'I notice you're from South Carolina. Are you kin to Capt. Henry Felder?' I said I didn't know. So I checked it out. There was actually a Felder bulletin board. So I asked if anyone had heard of him. Imagine my surprise, and chagrin, when I discovered I had been brought up 14 miles from his home site and had never been told of him by my own family.

"Henry Felder is so little known today. But for 50 years after the Revolutionary War he was very famous. As often happens, his fame faded away. One of his descendants from the 1900s was Sen. John R. Felder, whose portrait is hanging in the S.C. Senate. I didn't know about him either. It's interesting because if you Google Henry now he's there, just because of the play I was commissioned to write and perform, and now our movie."

Felder was profoundly impressed by the tale of this principled immigrant-turned-guerrilla fighter in the backcountry of Orangeburg. After decades of dealing with hostile as well as friendly Indian tribes, Henry Felder led his militia against Tory loyalists and British army incursions even as Gen. George Washington's army lay perilously close to defeat in the North. Felder's militia of family and community members resisted from 1776 to 1781.

And it was Felder who wrote "Articles of Separation from the English King" months before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.

Research online at the S.C. Department of Archives and History in Columbia and other sources formed the scaffolding of the play "Captain Felder's Cannon," as well as the screenplay. The film, which already has captured three awards from the Accolade Film Competition, is two-thirds a matter of historical record and one-third artistic license, an attempt to fill in the blanks, Felder says.

"The most challenging aspect of writing the screenplay was what Chris calls 'research euphoria,' the tendency to want to put into the film every single factoid and detail available. And you just can't, so it became about editing. The other thing I had to remember was that as fascinating as all this history was to me, an audience also has to be entertained. Fortunately, I really love to entertain people."

On the ground

A story analyst and one-time instructor at Juilliard and the American Film Institute, Mangravite took the movie to Beijing.

"It was memorable to be able to work with the direct descendant of the main character," Mangravite says. "Clarence's decades of acting in films, television series and on Broadway brought authenticity and power to the film, which was a big issue for us. I wanted to create this movie because it tells the story of a forgotten part of our history. These people suffered and did so much, yet they have pretty much disappeared from national memory. We walk the ground they did but rarely connect with what happened on that ground."

"All For Liberty" rejects the too-familiar Hollywood template in favor of greater complexity. The American Revolution was no simple "chess match of bluecoats vs. redcoats." Strife, likewise, separated neighbors and friends, eventually destroying whole communities.

Says Weatherford, "We had seven historical advisers and we listened to all of them. You then begin to meld all of it together. No matter how much anyone has studied, there is finally a good deal of conjecture and you have to decide what you think happened. The movie really expands the monologues of the play to this huge canvas. Then we had to distill it down and lop off all these subplots.

"Finally, we threw everything out that did not hurl us forward to the next action point. I love history but it has to be compelling."

For further information on the films, workshops and ticket availability, visit www.charlestoniff.com.

In his Homeric heart of hearts, Clarence Felder is Achilles. Or El Cid. Or, perhaps, his own valiant ancestor.Adapted by Felder from his own play, and directed by Chris Weatherhead, his partner in Moving Images Productions (and in life), the film enjoyed its world premiere March 21 at Beijing Inter