Seven Sisters Cinema kicks off its second season of documentary films with a visit by award winning filmmaker Elizabeth Barret and a screening of her 2000 documentary film, Stranger With a Camera. This film was the winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival Silver Spire award and a nominee for a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, where it debuted. The film investigates the murder of filmmaker Hugh OConnor in Letcher County, Kentucky.

Seven Sisters Cinema, a division of Serpent Child Ensemble, will present the film on Thursday, March 24 at 7 p.m. at White Horse Black Mountain on Montreat Road in Black Mountain. The mission of Seven Sisters Cinema is to bring documentary films of regional interest and their filmmakers to local audiences.

In 1967 Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor visited the mountains of Central Appalachia to document poverty. A local landlord, Hobart Ison, who resented the presence of filmmakers on his property, shot and killed the filmmaker, in part because of his anger over the media images of Appalachia that had become icons in the nation's War on Poverty.

Decades later, Elizabeth Barret uses that tragic death as a lens to explore the complex relationship between those who make films to promote social change and the people whose lives are represented in such media productions. Through first-person accounts of the killing and the perspective of three decades of reflection, Stranger with a Cameraleads viewers on a quest for understanding—a quest that ultimately leads Elizabeth to examine her own role as both a maker of media and a member of the Appalachian community she portrays. She will be at the screening to talk and answer questions.

David Whisnant, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said Stranger With A Camera is one of the best documentaries ever made, way beyond everything that has ever been done on the issue of where images come from and how images are perceived from different perspectives.