New film explores Appalshop’s enduring legacy, EKY, and the meaning of home
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- New film 'Appalheads' documents Appalshop’s legacy and ties to Whitesburg.
- Director Anna Richardson White honors her parents and region’s media pioneers.
- Film debuts in Kentucky amid national festival circuit and podcast promotion.
Anna Richardson White has spent most of her professional life in New York and California, but, to quote Happy Chandler, like every Kentuckian, she was always thinking about coming home.
For her, home was Whitesburg, the frame house she grew up in, and the tall wooden structure near downtown known as Appalshop. Both buildings were designed by her father, architect Bill Richardson, who came to Kentucky in 1969 with a War on Poverty grant to start a film workshop to tell the stories of Appalachia.
More than 50 years later, the 2022 floods that engulfed Whitesburg and nearly destroyed Appalshop was one of the factors that got White, a communications and content creator, to think about a film about her remarkable parents, Bill and Josephine Richardson, and what they created in Letcher County and beyond.
The result, “Appalheads” is a tribute to the Richardsons, the continuing legacy of Appalshop, and the ties of home that bind us no matter where we go.
“The fact Appalshop is there and has endured all this time, and weathered a flood, where people are still making films and great radio —it would be unique anywhere, but it’s still unique, and it’s happening in Eastern Kentucky,” White said.
As she explains in the short film, Appalheads was a derisive term that locals called people like the Richardsons, who came from the Northeast to start up an alternative media center that included filmmaking and a radio station, WMMT.
But the Richardsons stayed on, and so did Appalshop, all becoming an integral part of Whitesburg and Eastern Kentucky. And they all fought against the stereotypes that most of the country used to define this part of the world.
“Appalshop has pushed the edge of what was the norm and what was accepted,” White said. “The people there were from the region, they were sharing their stories, which were very different from the stories mainstream media would make.”
The film is an introduction to Appalshop and the Richardsons, who are now in their 80s. White, who is now on the Appalshop board of directors, said she envisions a series of short films that goes deeper into the documentary film work Appalshop’s filmmakers have produced over the years, everything from “Stranger with a Camera,” to “The Ralph Stanley Story,” to the many examinations of the coal industry.
Filmmaker Mimi Pickering came to Whitesburg in 1972 after working with Bill Richardson on a film, and like him, stayed there. She said she appreciated how many different stories White managed to fit into a 15-minute film.
“Anna is telling her own story about growing up in Whitesburg, and I really appreciate her interviews with her dad because he was responsible for me coming to Appalshop and for getting it going and continuing it,” Pickering said.
“It’s a very sweet and tender look at him and where he’s at today, and about getting older.”
White is coming home again this month to show her work to her native state.
On Thursday, Sept. 25, it will be shown at a Hyphen Film Center event in Louisville, followed by an audience conversation with White. On Saturday, Sept. 27, Appalheads will be at Lexington’s Kentucky Theatre as part of the Twelve Lions Film Festival at 5 p.m. (P.S. Lexington actor Michael Shannon will also be at Twelve Lions to debut his new film “Eric LaRue.”
And on Thursday, Sept. 25 the festival is holding a special screening of Elizabeth Barret’s “Stranger with a Camera” as a benefit for the Kentucky Humanities Council.
Then on Monday, Sept. 29, White will bring the project back to the place it started with a special screening at the new WMMT studios in downtown Whitesburg, newly outfitted since the flood. The Appalshop team is temporarily being housed in Jenkins, but they have purchased a former hospital in the hills above Jenkins well out of the floodplain where they will eventually locate.
White has been entering the film at film festivals around the country, and so far it has won Best Short Film awards at the Flyover Film Festival in Louisville and at the Sundial Film Festival, in Redding, Calif. She’s also busy with a new podcast titled “Homeplace,” which explores all the ways we define ourselves.
“I wanted to make this film that showcases a piece of Appalshop’s story,” White said. “There’s such a pioneering spirit and such grit, and there’s so much more to tell.”
This story was originally published September 11, 2025 at 11:20 AM.
