PORT TOWNSEND — Listen to the rising music of a violin, viola and cello, and you connect with the art of the “Port Townsend five.”
These men, who range in age from 24 to 70-plus, shape wooden sticks into wands that stir the soul.
Longtime residents of these parts, they have the title roles in “The Bowmakers,” a documentary film that takes viewers up and over Port Townsend and into the forests of Brazil, source of their raw material.
After more than two years of travel, filming, interviewing and editing, producer Rocky Friedman and director-cinematographer Ward Serrill are poised to release their movie.
Tickets to the 6 p.m. Aug. 17 premiere at the Rose Theatre will go on sale at 2:30 p.m. Friday at rosetheatre.com and at the box office at 235 Taylor St.
Friedman expects them to sell fast, since he’s already set aside a generous portion of the seats for the movie’s artists, musicians and donors.
Serrill, a veteran filmmaker, has lived here seven years. For Friedman, owner of the Rose, it’s 37. He thought he would direct a documentary someday. But with “The Bowmakers,” he found that producing is the right role.
Friedman was unpaid. He still sounds incredulous — and grateful — for the experience of bringing this story to the screen.
As a favor to a friend in early 2017, Friedman gave local luthier James Island a ride to Seattle. The two men hit it off and talked the whole way. Friedman learned his hometown is a center, a mecca for makers of the things connecting musicians to resonant strings.
He followed a gut feeling. He learned more. He talked with Serrill and then talked some more until the director said, “I’m in.”
Off they went on an odyssey to hidden studios and concert spaces in Port Townsend, France, Portland, Ore., and New York City. In Guarana and Recife, Brazil, they walked in forests and neighborhoods where bows, seedlings and music are key ingredients for life.
“Everywhere we went in the world, we heard about ‘Chuck’ or ‘Charley,’ ” Serrill said.
He is Charles Espey, the Port Townsend septuagenarian known as the grandfather of modern bowmaking. He’s also a master teacher of the elite fine art, “but he wouldn’t tell you that,” Serrill added.
“Everyone else told us,” Friedman said.
That includes three of the other four subjects of “The Bowmakers”: Ole Kanestrom, Robert Morrow and Cody Kowalski. All were Espey apprentices. The film also highlights master bowmaker Paul Siefried, who is, like the rest, a resident of Port Townsend.
In a world overtaken by high-speed technology, the men are keeping a handmade tradition alive, Serrill said. The Port Townsend five practice the bowmaking art — with the same tools and techniques — as their predecessors did two and a half centuries ago.
To illustrate the early evolution of the bow and its music, Port Townsend animator Andrea Love created sequences within the film.
Using animated dolls and tableaux, she brings the viewer inside the courts of medieval Europe, then takes them on Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral’s 16th-century voyage to Brazil.
Friedman raised $425,000 — from donors — to produce the film: $400,000 for the content onscreen and the rest for distribution and marketing.
After the premiere, “The Bowmakers” will be part of the Sept. 19-22 Port Townsend Film Festival, and a week after that it will start its theatrical run at the Rose. Film festivals near and far, DVD release and online streaming are farther into the future.
So Friedman’s first movie is finished; there’s even a trailer to watch on Vimeo.
But a new trip is just getting going. The filmmakers are eager to share the tale of Port Townsend’s wand-shaping quintet.
Friedman called making a movie “a very optimistic act … a sort of shout of defiance.” With all of the hardness in the world, engaging with art “is a positive thing.”
Serrill, when he makes a film, gives in to his own curiosity and fascination. He started out skeptical about this documentary — yet couldn’t help but follow the bowmakers into their dens of handiwork and music.
In the end, Serrill said, it’s about beauty. In a time of upheaval — personal, global — he wants to show us the value of beauty in the world.
In “The Bowmakers,” it’s visible, audible, in five pairs of hands, one town, infinite music.
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Diane Urbani de la Paz, a former features editor for the Peninsula Daily News, is a freelance writer living in Port Townsend.
