Video Info:
This is the 5th and FINAL Documentary produced by David Carter and sponsored by local Sanibel Broker Eric Pfeifer.
The latest documentary created by seven-time Emmy Award winner David E. Carter, Postcards & Photos from Sanibel: The Sequel, premiered at The Community House on Tuesday, January 30 at 7 p.m. The film features more than 60 historic photographs from the Charlie McCullough collection.
Carter’s new documentary is a feature- length film done “Ken Burns style,” with narrators reading “postcards and photos from Sanibel” with a storyline that follows life on Sanibel from 1946 through 1984. Photographs and postcards from Sanibel are the foundation of the piece.
“What started as an initiative from Eric Pfeifer to expand the Sanibel Public Library’s vintage photo collection eventually became the basis for this new film,” said Carter. “When I originally went to the library and asked to see their collection, they had about 500 photographs, but more than 2,000 additional images to be scanned.”
According to Carter, a large majority of the images in the library collection featured photographs of Sanibel prior to the construction of the causeway, which opened on May 26, 1963. More recent images were scarce. That is, until members of the McCullough family stepped forward and offered the filmmaker total access to the Charlie McCullough collection, many of which were taken between the late 1960s and early 1980s.
“This sequel is truly going to be a tribute to Charlie McCullough’s work,” noted Carter. “His family has been so generous to make these images available to me.”
The original documentary, which premiered in early 2017, covered the years 1884 – when the Sanibel Lighthouse was built – through 1947. The new film picks up in 1946, to provide a transition between the two stories, and ends in 1984, the 100th anniversary of the lighthouse.
“Having these photos took the sequel to a whole different level of storytelling,” said Carter. “The scope of Charlie’s work and the subject matter he was looking to chronicle were his memories of Sanibel. And some of the images he took, many of which were from the early 1980s, look as if they could have been taken 40 years earlier. That’s the timelessness of Sanibel that he captured.”
Postcards & Photos from Sanibel: The Sequel is the fifth film in the Pfeifer Documentary Series. Proceeds from the film screenings, DVD sales and related activities have produced more than $30,000 for island non- profit organizations.