On May 6, 2013, Anchorage public television showed a short, no-frills feature about the polka band on the ski train. "I am a Polka-meister" marked the debut of "Indie Alaska," a home-grown featurette dedicated to the quirky but honest stories of real-life residents of the 49th state.
Patrick Yack, Alaska Public Media's chief content officer, said the short documentaries were intended as an antidote to the rash of national shows bent on depicting Alaskans as extreme and weird. "With so much reality TV about Alaska, we wanted to tell stories we knew to be true, genuine, authentic," he said.
Three years later, the team has produced 85 "Indie Alaska" shows that have drawn an audience of millions on television, radio and online. Topics have ranged from winter cycling to aurora hunting and the cabs of Bethel, from a religious pilgrimage to Spruce Island near Kodiak to a Russian dumpling restaurant in Juneau. They've been played on national public radio and television, promoted on the "News Hour" website and, recently, picked up by Nippon TV in Japan.
On Thursday, March 31, a bouquet of the best will be put on the big screen at Bear Tooth Theatrepub.
Aside from a couple of individual screenings around town or in Alaska Public Media's building, this is the first time the programs have been shown in a real theater, said video producer John Norris, who hopes it will be the first of many such events. There are plans, he said, to create an episode on the spot.
"We're going to try to interview people in line before the screening," he said. "While the show's underway, my very excited crew will be editing away and we'll show the finished product at the end."
In addition to showing some of the more popular programs in the series, and debuting at least one new one, the event includes a Q&A session after the flicks. "Our goal is to connect with people who watch and get some feedback," Norris said, and "suggestions and nominations for future shows."
"Indie Alaska" began with a grant from PBS digital studios in 2012. Several public television stations received money to explore digital technology. Many of the stations used the money to hire out-of-area producers to create a show or series, but Alaska took a different track, Yack said.
"We took the grant and internalized it," he said.
Simple, small DSLR (digital single lens reflex) cameras were purchased and a three-person team set out to discover Alaska in short clips. The series became "a training ground for how to do new and exciting content," Norris said. Recently other PBS stations have adopted the approach, he added, especially since "Indie Alaska" features started showing up in online film festivals hosted by the network.
Most of the "Indie Alaska" features run between two and five minutes. They tend not to feature hosts or narrators. "We're not thinking about Web or TV," Norris said. "We focus on the interview and the story. So a number of the shows work well on radio."
The real buzz for the producers is going into the field to discover the unexpected, Norris said. He named the Russian dumpling restaurant and a film archivist in Fairbanks as subjects he thought would be dull but which turned out marvelously. It was the people who made the difference, he said.
"People Outside think of Alaskans as one sort of person," he said. "But everyone has their own phenomenal story that you don't need to make up. It's awesome to show what life is really like for a water-taxi operator or a weight lifter, to meet the people and find they have this interesting insight on where they live.
"We're just fortunate to be able to travel around Alaska and see things like ice fishing in Kotzebue. I mean, if you've never been to Kotzebue, what are the odds that you've seen a sheefish being pulled up that barely fits through the hole in the ice?"
If there's anything that connects the real unicyclists, Native dancers, cooks, pilots, ice climbers and roa house operators of the Last Frontier, it's an attitude, Norris said. "We like ourselves. We think we're pretty awesome, and we are. It's amazing to see how people in Alaska live.
"Who are these wonderful people that all of us know?"
Indie Alaska
When: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 31
Where: Bear Tooth Theatrepub
Tickets: $12, available at beartooththeatre.net