MOBILE, Alabama — Long before podcasts and streaming platforms turned every filmmaker into a self-published brand, a local cable program called CA.TV was already doing the work of connecting Coastal Alabama’s small but growing film community with the audiences who wanted to know more about it. In one such conversation, CA.TV sat down with Gideon Carson Kennedy, a Mobile writer and filmmaker who also serves as Program Director of the SoAl Film Fest, to talk about his latest project, “Clandestine,” an unconventional feature built almost entirely from archival “found” footage that was headed that year to the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, one of the largest and most respected nonfiction film gatherings in the world.
The interview offered a rare, unhurried look at how a homegrown Gulf Coast film gets made without a studio, a distributor, or much of a budget at all — and at the strange, often accidental path that led a self-described “film geek” from a Mobile bookstore and a college movie-review column into festival premieres on two continents.
A film built out of other people’s footage
According to Kennedy, “Clandestine” began as a suggestion from an Atlanta filmmaker friend, Matt Owensby, who wanted to make a movie centered on the shortwave radio phenomenon known as numbers stations — the coded broadcasts of spoken digits, tones, and phrases that have puzzled shortwave listeners for decades and are widely believed to have been used by intelligence agencies to relay encrypted instructions to operatives in the field using unbreakable one-time-pad ciphers. Numbers stations are a well-documented, if still mysterious, feature of the shortwave dial; hobbyists around the world have logged and archived thousands of these broadcasts since the Cold War, and a number of them, according to radio researchers and outlets that have covered the subject over the years, continue to transmit today even though no government has ever officially claimed them. It is exactly the kind of real-world oddity — equal parts bureaucratic and eerie — that lends itself to cinematic treatment.
Owensby offered Kennedy a trade: if Kennedy would write the script, Owensby would direct. Kennedy agreed, on the condition that his longtime collaborator and editor, Marcus Rosentrater, be brought on for post-production. What started as a fairly conventional arrangement changed shape once Kennedy began drafting the story. He conceived of a film composed almost entirely of ephemeral film — the catch-all term for old newsreels, industrial training films, movie serials, advertisements, and public-service announcements that were never intended to last, let alone be repurposed as art. That approach effectively eliminated the traditional director’s role of staging and shooting new material, since the visual backbone of the film already existed in archives and forgotten reels. Owensby, a fan of exactly this kind of obscure found footage, stayed enthusiastic about the concept even as it moved away from a role he could occupy, but a heavier course load eventually forced him to step back from the project. Kennedy and Rosentrater pressed on as a two-person team, a decision Kennedy said in the interview they were fortunate not to know, at the time, would take years to see through to completion.
Kennedy traced the film’s themes back to his own curiosity about who actually listens to numbers stations. Beyond the spies presumably receiving instructions, there is an entire community of shortwave enthusiasts who log these broadcasts without any hope of ever understanding their content. That tension between not being able to know the meaning of something and still finding meaning in it anyway became the thematic engine for the fictional narrative that runs alongside the film’s documentary material — a dynamic Kennedy declined to explain fully in the interview, saying it was better discussed after audiences had a chance to see the film for themselves.
A warm-up project with its own strange history: “Dick-George, Tenn-Tom”
Before “Clandestine” was finished, Kennedy and Rosentrater made a shorter piece, “Dick-George, Tenn-Tom,” that grew out of an entirely different kind of found material. While working at Bienville Books in downtown Mobile, Kennedy came across old Chamber of Commerce publications documenting President Richard Nixon’s 1971 visit to the city. That visit is itself a real and well-documented moment in Mobile history: Nixon traveled to Mobile on May 25, 1971, to take part in ceremonies dedicating the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway project, the massive Army Corps of Engineers inland shipping channel connecting the Tennessee River to Mobile Bay — a detail that explains the short film’s otherwise puzzling title, a play on Nixon’s nickname and the waterway’s common shorthand, “Tenn-Tom.”
Kennedy said he was initially drawn to the Chamber of Commerce materials simply because there was so much of it, and because the photographs and event programs were in the public domain, making them fair game for reuse. He described starting the project almost as an editing exercise: gather the photographs, write a fictional account of the event, and cut the two together for a bit of dark comedy. But the more he researched the actual visit, the less interested he became in inventing anything, since the real political texture of the event was stranger than anything he could fabricate. That research became a broader interest for Kennedy in what he called the small tributaries of history that feed into the larger, more familiar narrative — the overlooked local footnotes to national events. Once he had a rough cut, he brought it to Rosentrater, who re-edited it into its final form. Kennedy said that although work on “Clandestine” had actually begun first, it was “Dick-George, Tenn-Tom” that helped the pair figure out, as a team, what kind of filmmaking they wanted to pursue long-term.
From video store clerk to co-director
Kennedy told CA.TV that he never set out to be a filmmaker. He grew up steeped in movies rather than sports, and writing, not directing, was always his stated career goal. In college he freelanced film reviews for the alternative press and managed the student-run campus movie theater; after graduation he worked at an independent video store while also taking a job on an actual film production. It was during this period that he developed an idea for a short story that, he came to believe, could only work as a film rather than prose, since its first-person narrator would logically film himself telling his story rather than sit down to write it. He also wanted to test a theory he had developed while watching the wastefulness of a full-scale film production up close: that a strong script, one well-rehearsed actor, and a genuinely skilled editor could replace most of the expense of traditional filmmaking without necessarily sacrificing a compelling result.
Kennedy wrote the script and found his actor, but shelved the project for lack of an editor until he met Rosentrater, who had begun working at the same video store. Impressed by Rosentrater’s evident study of editing as a craft, Kennedy pitched him the project. From that first short, titled “Exclusive,” the two settled into a working method neither had originally intended: rather than one director and one editor, they found they worked best meeting in the middle of the production process together. Kennedy credited the simple enjoyment of that collaboration with keeping him actively involved in film production rather than retreating to screenwriting alone.
Amsterdam first, then home to the Crescent
At the time of the CA.TV interview, Kennedy and Rosentrater were preparing for their first trip to Amsterdam that November to premiere “Clandestine” at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Founded in 1988, IDFA has grown into one of the largest and most influential documentary festivals in the world, drawing thousands of industry professionals and cinephiles to the Dutch capital every November for a program built around nonfiction and hybrid storytelling — a fitting stage for a film that deliberately blurs the line between documentary footage and fictional narrative. Kennedy said travel preparations for the trip meant the filmmakers would not be able to hold a hometown screening first, but that they planned to show “Clandestine” at the Crescent Theater on Dauphin Street in downtown Mobile shortly after returning from Europe. The Crescent has long served as one of the few venues in the Mobile area dedicated to independent and art-house film, making it a natural home for a locally made project without a conventional distributor behind it.
Three ideas, one modest budget
Asked what came next, Kennedy said Rosentrater had agreed to take over more of the promotional work for “Clandestine” as it made the festival rounds, freeing Kennedy to focus on writing their next project. The pair had three feature-length ideas under consideration: a documentary built around one especially memorable bar story, told by the people who lived it; a cinematic essay tracing several generations of an industrial and political family with worldwide influence across the 20th century; and what would be the first feature film adaptation of a cookbook, for which they were, at the time, negotiating film rights with the author. Kennedy said the deciding factor in which project moved forward first would likely come down to funding, since unlike their earlier, largely self-financed efforts, any of the three would require a real, if modest, production budget. He noted a common thread running through all three ideas: each explores the blurry boundary between fact and fiction and documentary and narrative form, each takes an unconventional approach to structure, and each is set against some slice of the American 20th century — with Nixon, half-joking, likely to make another appearance somewhere along the way.
Encouraging a growing local scene
Asked for advice for other Coastal Alabama filmmakers, Kennedy was hesitant to generalize, noting that what worked for him would not necessarily work for anyone else. He did point to what he saw as a genuine advantage of working in the region: a small-town helpfulness among the people involved, and a growing community of local filmmakers who were increasingly connecting with one another. He said those connections mattered not only for collaboration but for the introductions filmmakers could make for each other — a modest but telling window into how independent film scenes take root in places without the built-in infrastructure of Los Angeles or New York, one relationship and one borrowed camera at a time.
“Clandestine” would go on to screen at additional festivals beyond its Amsterdam premiere in the months that followed, part of a broader run that also carried the film to festivals in the United States, reflecting the kind of grassroots momentum that has periodically put Mobile-area independent filmmakers in front of national and international audiences despite working well outside the traditional studio system.