Yellow Cat Productions was started in Oxford, Mississippi in 1972 with HOMEPLACE, a film on folk life in the hill country of North Mississippi. It is a  28 minute 16mm documentary completed in 1975.

The project took place in Oxford as well as Lafayette, Marshall, Panola, and Tate counties. I spent many months in a remote area north of Sardis Lake researching and photographing. Some places, like the town of Chulahoma, are now listed as “an extinct community.” The film tells a story of some people in vanishing agrarian America that I got to see. Now, of course, it’s totally gone.

In March 2013 The Library of Congress acquired the “Michael Ford Mississippi Collection.”  The collection consists of 16,ooo feet of 16mm film, 10.5 hours of recordings of interviews and music, and 1000+ still photographs made during the production of HOMEPLACE in 1972-73. The material will be used in a 40 year retrospective documentary presently in production. The material to be gathered on the 3 week shoot this spring will be added the Library’s holdings at a later date.

The archive will be housed in the same group as the Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger collection. For more information on the documentary project drop us a line.