Documentary featuring W.Va. town, Beckley doctor debuts in southern W.Va.

Oct. 5—A recently released documentary focuses on the hardships of a single town in southern West Virginia whose people have been pleading for decades for recognition and action in the face of devastation and death.

The documentary, called "Impossible Town," tells the story of Beckley native Dr. Ayne Amjad and her fight for the Minden community, whose exposure to the industrial chemical polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) has caused several residents to contract deadly diseases.

"I call this the death valley highway," says a Minden resident in the opening seconds of the trailer for "Impossible Town."

As he walks down a street in Minden, he points out homes along the way whose residents have since died of cancer or are still battling cancer or some other life-threatening disease.

"... brain tumor, blood disorder, throat cancer. How can you tell me there's not a problem?" he says finally.

After premiering at a film festival in Colorado in May, the documentary is being shown in places where the landscapes it captured are more recognizable.

As part of a tour through Appalachia, the documentary is being shown in seven locations across West Virginia and Pennsylvania, with its final viewing taking place near where the film originated.

"Impossible Town" will be shown at 7 p.m. Saturday at Historic Fayette Theater in Fayetteville and at 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Raleigh Playhouse and Theatre in Beckley.

The film's co-directors Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris plan to attend the screenings to answer questions and hear reactions from community members.

This screening series is made possible with support from Anonymous Was a Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts, Real WV and Universe Creative.

Whether this is a new story or one people have heard again and again, Amjad said she hopes the documentary serves as a call to action and sparks the interest of anyone who watches it.

"I hope it sparks good, thoughtful conversation of what is going on around people and that it motivates people to want to do more than what they're doing," she said.

Though she has been a fierce advocate for the people of Minden for several years, it was her father, Dr. Hassan Amjad, who was first attracted to the area, its people and its difficulties.

"It was the early 1980s, and (my father) had a clinic in Oak Hill, West Virginia," Amjad said. "He was an oncologist and hematologist, so he would see patients there, and a lot of them would have leukemia or lymphoma or different types of cancers. And there was a group that happened to live in that area, Minden."

Before his passing in 2017, Amjad's father introduced her to the people of Minden and asked that she carry on his research on how exposure to PCBs was affecting their health.

The small community is the site of the former Shaffer's Equipment Company, a United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site — a site the federal government had declared contaminated and in need of cleanup by federal officials following the discovery of PCBs in 1984.

Unlike most films, this one does not come to a happy resolution or even really have an ending.

"It's all still in limbo," Amjad said.

One possible resolution that the Minden community has been fighting for, which is highlighted in the documentary, is funds from the federal government to relocate.

Amjad said the EPA recently held a meeting in Minden to talk with residents, but there has yet to be any action as a result of that meeting.

Faris, who grew up in West Virginia, said he and Griffiths have worked together for the past 10 years as documentary filmmakers and "have an explicit focus on positive socially impactful storytelling."

When asked how they stumbled upon the story, Faris said it was a friend from an online magazine in Wheeling who pointed them toward Amjad and Minden.

"It just so happened that the editor of Weeluck (in Wheeling) at the time is a former high school classmate of Dr. Amjad, and he said, 'You should really reach out to Dr. Amjad; I think she's trying to move a town or something,'" Faris said. "And that just struck us as so interesting, and once we heard that, we had to know more. That was really the start of the project."

Faris said they reached out to Amjad in December 2018 and pitched her their documentary idea.

"She said yes, with basically no questions asked," he said. "Her response this whole time has been, if there's any chance that this will help Minden, count me in, I'm on board, let's do it."

Although the story of Minden has garnered national attention from publications like the Washington Post in the past, Griffiths said the documentary tells the story of the Minden community in a way that has yet to be done.

"I think the resulting film is shocking and heartbreaking," Griffiths said. "It really, I think, will challenge viewers' thinking ... We thought that the story about the Amjad family and their connection to this town and the work they were doing was really fascinating as well, and I think has always been a surprise to people that we share the story with that are not from West Virginia."

In the years they've spent filming the documentary, Griffiths said they learned that the story of Minden was more complicated than what it appeared to be on the surface.

"I think the perspectives of our participants and the journey that they go on during the five years of production and where we land will really surprise viewers," she said. "I think for us as filmmakers — and I'm a former journalist — we had a real commitment to uncovering the facts and really trying to deeply understand what has caused, over the years, some of the challenges and the miscommunications of really making progress on this one issue in Minden of contamination by PCBs."

Now that the film has made its debut in West Virginia, Faris said they are working on ways to make the film available to a wider audience.

For the latest news on "Impossible Town" and upcoming screenings, go to impossibletown.com.

Impossible Town was partly funded by The Redford Center, the George and Fay Young Foundation and the International Documentary Association.

Email: jmoore@register-herald.com