The Walker Percy Project
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WIN RILEY FILMS, NEW ORLEANS
Win Riley
— In his new film, Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Win Riley offers a touching, nuanced portrait of Percy, the great Catholic novelist and philosopher. Deftly alternating between interviews with friends and scholars, narration, photographs, and original video recordings, Riley highlights Percy's search for meaning and his escape from the shadow of family suicides and the tragic, early death of his mother to an understanding of himself, God, and possibility for human significance founded in the Christian faith. — Micah Mattix, First Things
Description
Walker Percy: A Documentary Film tells its story with archival film, excerpts from Percy's work, and interviews with family, friends, and scholars and Percy. It was broadast on PBS beginning in 2011.
Quotes from the film"I see [Walker Percy] in the line of great American figures. People who are determined to find their own way in this country and go on a search, and aren't settled or satisfied until they've found what they're searching for. It's a classic American search that has one foot in the past and one foot in the world we live in, of television, of suburbs, of vanished fraditions." — Paul Elie
"He was always very curious about language. He was always asking people with young children-'what's the first word (he or she said)? What's the first sound?' " — Tom Cowan
"One of the great things about The Moviegoer is as you say the wonderful details and the little potted descriptions of people — of Mercer, of Eddie Lovell and his wife, of Kate. What those descriptions fundamentally say to the reader is not just pay attention, but they also say: pay attention because life is worth your attention. You will, if you notice these things, you will discover that life is worth living. You will discover that there is enough here to support you. So yes, it is aesthetically pleasing, but it is morally and spiritually important as well." — Richard Ford
Walker Percy Documentary website
Walker Percy Documentary video clips (YouTube)
(each clip opens in a new window)
Win Riley is a director, writer, and producer based in New Orleans. His first documentary film, Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist, won several awards and was broadcast on PBS.
Release Date: 2011