Moving a house in the shifting South

When Southern-born, New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire learned that his North Carolina cousin Charles Silver was going to literally uproot the family's ancestral mid-19th century plantation home called Midway and haul it to a quieter location -- far from the encroachment of real-estate developers -- Cheshire's documentary instincts kicked in. And thankfully so, because "Moving Midway," his engaging chronicle of the physical, historical and psychological effect of the undertaking, is also an invitation for a film buff to meditate on the antebellum South's mythic power in stories and film (from "Birth of a Nation" to "Roots"), and a personal genealogical inquiry that uncovers a parallel family line of slave-descendant cousins he'd never met.

One is New York University professor Robert Hinton, whose insight from the African American perspective is enriching and often funny, as when he challenges Cheshire's steel-magnolia mom at a Civil War reenactment on her love of the typically white-only spectacles, and the notion that the conflict was about states' rights more than slavery. Says a smiling Hinton to Cheshire later, "I'm perfectly happy to have them keep fighting the war, as long as they keep losing it."

In this potentially monumental election year for racial progress and demographic change in North Carolina, "Moving Midway" and its house-relocating metaphor plays its own quirky yet thoughtful part in the question of how much the South has truly moved. Wide load indeed.

-- Robert Abele

"Moving Midway." MPAA rating: unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. At Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.

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Politics and the tainting of youth

Luke Eberl's "Choose Connor" is a real stunner, an unusual coming-of-age story that packs a wallop in unexpected ways. It is all the more remarkable because writer-director-editor and co-producer Eberl was only 20 when he made it.

Eberl has both a dryly cynical grasp of how the world of politics can work and a gift for complex characterization coupled with an ability to draw from actors spot-on portrayals of much range and depth. He can suddenly unleash a jolting fear yet not let his film lapse into a standard suspense thriller; he is skilled at the visual as well as the verbal, a filmmaker of formidable powers of persuasion.