Local Man's Documentary a Homage to David Moses Bridges
“Rhythms of the Heart” available on Prime Video via Prime Video Direct
SOUTHWEST HARBOR—Sometimes a film is more than a film. Sometimes, it’s an act of love.
Rhythms of the Heart, a documentary by Southwest Harbor’s Thom Willey, is one of those films as it explores the art, life, and cancer diagnoses of David Moses Bridges, a nationally recognized, indigenous canoe and basket craftsman, educator, and cultural promoter.
Willey is a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship winner, a perfectionist when it comes to craft, and is stunning at bringing light and truth to the people he films. When those people are already full of light? The result is magical.
The 2017 film is now available on Prime Video via Prime Video Direct. The film features Passamaquoddy craftsman Bridges during his fight to preserve heritage, culture, and family while facing cancer.
With a score by Maine musicians: composer Chris Gray, songwriter Doug Beaver and Burnurwurbskek singer/drummer Ronnie Bear, the film is a story of Brdiges’ artistry, courage, and activism
In the early 2010s, Bridges was diagnosed with sinus cancer and Willey volunteered to make a film to help raise funds for treatment.
“I had planned a short film,” Willey had told the Mount Desert Islander’s Nan Lincoln.
But nothing about love is short, Willey found out, and Bridges was too big to be contained even in a feature-length film. Bridges died in 2017. He was 54. He continues to inspire. His wife, Patricia Ayala Rocabado, made a book of his works. Donald Soctomah and Jean Flahive released The Canoe Maker: David Moses Bridges, Passamaquoddy Birch Bark Artisan in 2019. His legacy, his time with other artists, and activists, lives on.
An article by Bob Keyes in the Portland Press Herald at the time of Bridges’ death read, “The Maine Arts Commission named him a Traditional Arts Fellow, the state’s highest honor in craft. In 2006, the First People’s Fund gave him its Community Spirit Award, a national honor in recognition of his work as an activist and traditional artist.
“‘For lack of a better term, he was a culture bearer, and he worked very hard at it for a very long time,’ said Hugh French, director of the Tides Institute & Museum in Eastport. ‘He was very proud of his culture, and he worked to preserve that culture through his own work and through education. It was a tall order, and he went at it hard.’”
Sometimes a film is more than a film; sometimes it’s a homage to a person who did so much hard work for communities and imbued that work with both beauty and substance. Willey’s film is a beautiful tribute.
Willey has a BFA in film and theater from Ohio University, is a 31-year member of the American Cinematographers Guild as a camera assistant and has worked on such films as Dan in Real Life starring Steve Carrell and Juliette Binoche and multiple Stephen King films including The Langoliers. Additional independent documentaries from Thom Willey Film include 2014’s Richard Estes: My Camera Is my Sketchbook and a documentary series currently in production, It’s Only Right: The Calvineers Movie.
Rhythms of the Heart first screened in New England movie theaters in 2017 and was funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the arts.
Disclosure: Thom Willey is probably my fourth cousin or something like that. One of my great-grandmothers was a Willey. I’m named after her.
Thank you for the article about David Moses Bridges. He was a good friend of mine and I've worked with his mother, Hilda, on Passamaquoddy legal issues over the yeara. I miss David a lot.
I rented my next door house to Dave and family for 6 years. Probably the most interesting people I’ll ever run into. Love those guys.