Sights, sounds of the South

“Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait,”

6:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. Oct. 10. $20-25. Lark Theatre, 549 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur. www.mvff.com

screen.

“You could tell he was a real lover of people,” says Bay Area filmmaker Finn Taylor, who along with Northern California musician Jenny Scheinman and editor Rick LeCompte has distilled Waters’ footage into “Kannapolis: A Movie Portrait,” a live music and film event scheduled for two performances at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

“What’s great is you see people in their environment . ... There’s a lot of joy there, some sorrow, some poverty,” says Taylor.

Waters’ work, raw and unedited, is kept in the film archive at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Rick Greenwald, executive director at the school’s performing arts organization, commissioned Scheinman — a violinist, singer and composer whose work ranges from jazz and Americana to a Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration, “Lulu” — to take Waters’ footage and turn it into a performance piece, giving her leave to use portions as is or cut into the footage.

“I recognized how special it was,” Scheinman says of the footage, “the candid nature of it, the lack of selfconsciousness in the people.”

But the process of turning Waters’ work into a one-hour performance piece was also daunting. There were some 200