Casco Bay Juniors Premiere Documentary on Katahdin Region

PORTLAND, Maine – Tonight, Tuesday, June 12, Casco Bay High School juniors will premiere their full-length documentary, “199 Miles: Stories from the Katahdin Region,” featuring unsung heroes from that area of Maine. The event will run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Hannaford Hall on the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus. The entire junior class spent a week in the region in April to lend a hand to local community development and document the stories of people living in Millinocket and nearby communities.

The documentary was created as part of the students’ Junior Journey. Each year, Casco Bay High School 11th-graders go on a one­week, cross­cultural learning experience to expand students’ sense of the world and who they are through service and adventure learning. In past years, juniors have travelled to West Virginia, Mississippi, New York City and Detroit to assist in community improvement efforts while also telling the untold and inspirational stories of locals through oral histories and brief films.

This year, the Katahdin region was chosen because it has a host of economic, environmental, cultural and political stories to tell. Millinocket spent almost a century in the sweet spot of the American dream, but now residents face the economic consequences of the closure of their mills, population decline, and many questions about how to move forward as a community. The region has a powerful natural history. Katahdin, or “Greatest Mountain” as the Penobscot call it, is a sacred bridge between earth and sky. The American transcendentalists memorialized this particular expanse of wilderness in Thoreau’s journal The Maine Woods. The modern environmental conservationist movement has watched this area closely since President Obama created the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument despite some fierce local outcry against federal ownership of land locals worked and vacationed on. The fate of the monument is still on the table. Casco Bay students documented people from the region telling its various stories.

WHAT: Casco Bay High School 11th-graders present “199 Miles: Stories from the Katahdin Region”

WHEN/WHERE: Tuesday, June 12, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at USM’s Hannaford Hall, the located in the Abromson Community Education Center at 88 Bedford St.