NORTH SMITHFIELD – The epic story of a little mill village and its important place in the nation’s history will now reach a worldwide audience.
Slatersville, America’s First Mill Village has been licensed by Tubi and is now available for streaming, anytime and from anywhere that the international service is available.
“This year we began working with FilmHub, a self-distribution company that works with over 130 streaming services worldwide,” explained town-based Director Christian de Rezendes, noting he expects additional streaming services to pick up the series in the coming months. “They expand our audience’s viewership tremendously, and we think there is more to come.”
Once complete, the 11 episode series will document a 200 year period of village history.
de Rezendes worked with Rhode Island PBS to distribute Season 1 of the series in fall of 2022, with five episodes covering the mill’s early years under the Slater family. That season is also now on Tubi, making the full series as released to date available to a wider audience.
News of the licensing agreement comes as the director prepares for several events showcasing the portions of the season, including several on first episode titled, “They Will All Be My Friends.” The episode focuses primarily on a period following purchase of the village by Henry Kendall through the labor strikes of the 1930s. Kendall bought the mill, commercial blocks and houses in 1915 for $383,000 from then owner James Hooper.
The episode, the sixth in the series, includes footage from the Great Textile Strike of 1934, which, 13 miles south of Slatersville in Saylesville, Rhode Island, turned into a week long street fight between workers and law enforcement, now known at the Saylesville Massacre. Four people were killed in the riots including two in Saylesville and two in Woonsocket.
The director had to purchase rights to use the remarkable black and white video clips from the original owners, including Fox, Sherman Grinberg/Paramount, UCLA/Hearst and British Pathe – no easy haul for a small, local production company.
“This also proved to be one of our most expensive endeavors in the making of Slatersville,” de Rezendes said. “The Saylesville sequence cost this production over $12,000, but it was a first to do historically in documentary terms and critical to our story.”
“We have painstakingly reconstructed the events by creatively editing this footage that blends between the locations of then and now and covered the events from various angles,” he said.
Featured interviews in the 72-minute episode include segments with Rhode Island labor historian, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO and author of a book on the Saylesville riots Patrick Crowley.
And it’s release comes in synch with the 90th anniversary of the riots.
At events coordinated with the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, de Rezendes will present portions of episodes 6 and 7.
The first will take place at Open Sky at 50 Douglas Road in Whitinsville on Saturday, August 17 among other talks, exhibits and activities related to World War II from 1 to 5 p.m.
The second takes place at Old Slater Mill at 67 Roosevelt Ave. in Pawtucket on Labor Day, Sunday, Sept. 1. The event will include several labor history talks including a presentation by de Rezendes and Crowley, along with Park Ranger Mark Mello starting at 1:30 p.m., with more information found here.
Much of the riot footage in episode 6 takes place in the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, where de Rezendes will be on Monday, Sept. 2, but this time, back behind the camera. That event, organized annually by local labor unions and labor history groups, will commemorate the strike, starting at 10 a.m.
That same day, Episode 8, a difficult piece where de Rezendes delves into race and class history, will premiere at the Museum of Work & Culture at 42 South Main St. in Woonsocket starting at 3:30 p.m. Just a few seats remain for that free event, which can be reserved here.
The flurry of excitement surrounding completion of season 2 comes, for the director, with the knowledge that he must still complete the third and final season with episodes 9, 10 and 11. The massive project began in 2011 with plans for a single documentary film.
“Then 15 years of work will be done,” de Rezendes said.
For now, his growing audience has plenty to chew on, and he has more than a few reasons to feel accomplished.
“The great news is that these streaming services are world-reaching,” he said.
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