The StoneMan

SYNOPSIS

I’ve just completed a project that I began over forty years ago. In 1975 I went back home to Indianapolis with a 16mm film camera and sound recorder to see something that I hadn’t ever seen before and wanted to record before it was too late – my father Vince Farrell making a gravestone. Vince spent his life in the business that my grandfather started in the 1880s. He was 79 and I was 28 when I first saw him make a gravestone through the viewfinder of that motion picture camera. That first trip turned into another trip a year later and eventually 30,000 feet of film shot (about 14 hours) and three times as much audio tape recordings as well as other visuals like family photos, his gravestone photos and drawings and historic images of Indianapolis, etc. And it turned out to be about a lot more than just how to make a gravestone.