By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

When “Native Daughter: CD Collins — A Reckoning” has its world premiere on Thursday, October 16 at the Kentucky Theatre, it won’t just be the fruition of a project 15 years in the making. For director Jean L Donohue, it will also complete what she now calls “a queer trilogy” of documentary films about the LGBTQ community in Kentucky. The trilogy began with “The Last Gospel of the Pagan Babies” (2017), which focused on Lexington artist Bob Morgan and his bohemian friends in the 1970s and ’80s, and “Under the Southern Cross: The Art and Legacy of Henry Faulkner” (2024).

Undermain caught up with Donohue, who works from the Danville home she shares with her professional colleague and life partner, producer-director Fred Johnson, during a break from last-minute preparations for “Native Daughter.” The film is about the writer, spoken-word artist and musician CD Collins, who divides her time between the Boston area and a farm in Mount Sterling. Produced in association with Media Working Group, an organization that supports independent filmmakers, “Native Daughter” tells the harrowing but ultimately uplifting life story of Collins (who Donohue calls by her first name, Cherie), who has spent years trying to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stemming from childhood abuse and a horrific gas-line explosion that left her severely burned when she was 10 years old.

Kevin Nance: How’s the film coming along?

Jean Donohue: This is the most stressful time of production. Sound, color — everything’s got to come together at once, and that’s when the big problems show up. It’s one thing after another. [Laughs.]

KN: You’re right down to the wire, then?

JD: Yeah. The sound guy is in Portland. The color-correction guy is in Cincinnati. And Fred and I are here in Danville, so it’s like master-puppeting, I guess. 

KN: Did you always know you were working on a trilogy?

JD: I didn’t know in the beginning that there would be a second one, although right after I started “Pagan Babies,” I had started shooting “Native Daughter,” more as a farm film than anything — a film about farming. But after “Pagan Babies” concluded, [historian] Jon Coleman [director of the Faulkner Morgan Archive, which preserves Kentucky’s LGBTQ history] was digging up all this new information about Henry, and I thought that Henry was not treated as fully as he should have been in “Pagan Babies.” So I decided to do a film about Henry, who was really well known internationally, not just locally, and his relationships with the intelligentsia in New York in the 1940s and ’50s were pretty astonishing.

KN: What is it that binds these films together? Is it just the fact that they’re all about gay people in Kentucky?

JD: Well, that’s what binds “Pagan Babies” and “Southern Cross.” But with Cherie, it was going to be more about her as an artist living part time in the Northeast and part-time in Kentucky, trying to keep her farm healthy. It was basically being destroyed by a series of farmers who were leasing it, none of whom were using sustainable farming practices.

KN: That was happening while she was living up North?

JD: Yes. She would come back and the house would be destroyed. She finally decided, around 2009 or 10, to come back part of the year, occupy the house, make her presence known and try to get her farm on a more sustainable trajectory. I remembered her from the late ’70s when she was a force in the lesbian community in Central Kentucky. She started reminding me of those days, and I realized that that local history was far more significant. So we just started talking, and this story — this personal story, which I really didn’t know — unfolded. I didn’t know how traumatic her childhood was, and I didn’t understand what PTSD really was, how it changes people’s behavior. Working on this film, I was bumping up against it. She’d be afraid to go to Athens, Ohio, with us to do some recording, for example, and there would be all this drama, over and over and over, in terms of her ability to feel good about it. She would suffer real terror at having to stay overnight in one of our colleagues’ house doing these recordings. I’d get calls from her in Boston saying she was being threatened by a girlfriend or something. I didn’t understand any of it. So I had to learn what this kind of syndrome is, and realized that it was occupying much of her life. And at that point the film changed directions pretty dramatically. 

KN: It went from being a film primarily about her as a lesbian to being a film about her trauma and the aftermath, including her writing about it.

JD: Yes.

KN: Her being a lesbian is not incidental in the film, but it’s not the focus of it. 

JD: Yes, and I think being a lesbian is not what she would say identifies her, really. Foremost, she’s a writer.

KN: In fact, she has a new book of short stories, “Blue Land,” coming out in January from the University Press of Kentucky. 

JD: Yes. It’s an exciting time for her.

KN: Let’s talk about the central trauma in her life, which takes up a lot of space in the film. She and members of her family were driving along a country road in Clark County in 1963 — they were on their way to the Red River Gorge — when an underground gas line exploded. It created a huge fire so hot that it melted the asphalt on the road. She remembers running down the road and the asphalt was melting, her shoes were melting, and her flesh on one side of her body was beginning to melt as well. She ended up with burns on 50 percent of her body and she was only 10 years old. You show an incredible photo of her in the hospital, lying naked on a bed with burns all along one side of her body. It’s amazing she survived.

JD: She said that the medical technology for burns at that time was not very advanced. Most children who had that kind of burn died. 

KN: She did survive, but there was also the trauma of her family life, which was complex to say the least. Both of her parents were erratic and —

JD: Neglectful.

KN: Kind of out of control, really. They drank, they fought, they weren’t very nurturing. At one point she had to get a restraining order on her father, who was showing up at her house drunk, waving a gun. She also got a much smaller settlement from the gas company than her brother did, just because she was a girl. Her father pressured her to sign an easement agreement on her property, which she refused to do. And there were legal battles with a series of tenants of her farm. So she was fighting the patriarchy all her life, literally and otherwise. 

JD: She was also sexually abused from a very early age. 

KN: Yes, both before and, amazingly, after the gas explosion. So in the film, we’re left with what she was able to make of it all, which is a body of work as writer, much of which she performs in the film, mostly from memory. 

JD: Yes, she performs those pieces a lot from memory. The work is very honed.

KN: What would you say you want viewers to take away from the film? What is it about? Survival? Resilience?

JD: Both. To me, it’s about my astonishment that someone can survive that much in their lifetime and still be alive — and not only that, that she has suffered like this and has become an amazing artist. I don’t think her artistry is because of her trauma — I think it’s in spite of all that … all that shit, you know? A lot of people say art comes out of pain, it comes out of the damage, but I don’t believe that. I think her art comes from her strength of will, her view of the world, and her spirit. Her spiritual life is what’s coming through. And that’s what’s important to me. I know so many incredible artists, sensitive artists who have suffered this kind of family carnage, and don’t make it. I have a friend who’s been totally destroyed by her parents. Beautiful artist, beautiful spirit, but she’s not making it. The damage is complete. For Cherie it’s a struggle, and I see her struggling, but she is rising above it. And she’s fighting it. I mean, it’s a real war with her. 

KN: In the film, you keep coming back to a pond on the farm. At one point she walks out onto the pond when it’s frozen and covered with snow and she makes a snow angel, which you come back to more than once. There’s also a scene where she’s swimming in the pond, pulling up and clearing away some invasive plants from the water. Which kind of symbolizes the whole story of the film. 

JD: The pond is the place we also went back to to pick up the conversation over the years. When we started the film, the pond had been poisoned by the neighbors who drained their chlorine-infested pool water into it. Also I see it in a Jungian way, as a symbol of the unconscious.

KN: Yes. We’re all swimming in it.

***

“Native Daughter: CD Collins — A Reckoning” has its world premiere at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main St. Advance tickets are available at kentuckytheatre.org.