credit: Cully Wright

Filmmaker Amoris Walker

Amoris Walker grew up traveling to schools around the country with her family’s band The EarthWalkers. Though they had always wanted to share their story, it wasn’t until Walker enrolled in a documentary film class at Portland State University that she had the time.

Walker's professor was  Steve Amen, Oregon Lens executive producer and host. He encouraged her to submit the film for consideration as part of OPB's summer series featuring Northwest independent filmmakers.

 The EarthWallkers chronicles the Walker Family’s four-year tour as they entertained and taught kids about environmentalism during the 1980s and '90s. Arts & Life sat down with Amoris Walker to talk about the challenges of being both the film’s subject and editor. 

You had lots of old footage to go through. What was that editing process like?

It was really difficult for me because I am so connected to the project. I’m seeing footage that maybe I haven’t ever seen or at least not in a very long time.

Normally on a documentary project I would go through all of the footage and log it to a hard drive. But for this project I really just picked bits and pieces that I wanted to share because of the timeframe that I had to work with.

Often I found myself spending a couple hours watching old footage and just reminiscing. It was really difficult in the editing process to get caught up with, “Oh, look at how cute my brother was as a kid," "Look at my mom in the '70s, she’s awesome.” It was really nostalgic and wonderful.

There’s so much footage, so many stories, that we’d really like to make it into a feature-length documentary at some point.

Can you talk about presenting yourself objectively as a subject in the film?

There’s a part in the documentary where I am being a brat. I’m sitting in the car and I’m saying, “I don’t want the world to see me eat.” And I’m looking at it thinking, “God, that’s hilarious.” And I kind of had to look at it thinking, "Do I really want people to see me like that?" And then I thought ultimately that it is part of the story and people who know me now know that I’m not like that.

I was a kid and I was cranky. We were packing everything into the car and going on the road. My brother and I became homeschooled after that so we had to drop everything and leave all our friends behind. We were thinking, “This is crazy... What are you doing?” After we’d done it for a while we thought it was pretty cool. 

Looking back I wouldn’t change it for anything, but at the time I think we felt, “Why don’t we get to be normal kids and stay home and ride our bikes?” I think our parents had different plans for what a childhood should be like.

What do you want to say to all your potential Oregon Lens viewers?

I really hope people enjoy [the film] and have a couple of laughs, and enjoy the music and learning about our little family band.

We had a message about saving the planet, but in the last couple of years it’s really become apparent that it’s not about saving the planet — but about saving the humans. What’s going to happen to the planet after we’re gone is that it will heal and renew itself.

Right now what we need to focus on is taking care of the planet so that we can as a human race continue to be healthy and have future generations live in a beautiful place. It’s not just about “reduce, reuse, recycle” or eating organic. It’s a combination of doing a little bit of everything and really caring about the place you live in. Just like the Bill Oliver song that the EarthWalkers sang thousands of times says: "You have to have a habitat, to carry on!"