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Matt Moyer and Amy Toensing | USA | 2024
Filmmaker and photographer, Matt Moyer, along with visual journalist Amy Toensing, are regular contributors to National Geographic magazine. The two are committed to telling stories that raise awareness with the hope that their stories will work to improve our world. Moyer and Toensing have done just this with their gut-wrenching documentary INHERITANCE.
Their journey all started when Moyer began to study filmmaking as a Knight Fellow at Ohio University. He was filming a food distribution at a church was approached by a guy named J.P., looking to tell his story about his search for redemption to “the filmmakers” at hand. J.P.’s story is a tragic one that is complex due to his heroin addiction that has lead to trauma, as well as incarceration. Moyer made a short film about J.P., involving Toensing as the second camera on the project.
In following J.P.’s story Moyer and Toensing realized there were far deeper reasons for his issues that related to being on the frontlines of the opioid crisis often documented in America. The disparity when battling substance abuse creates a loss of self, feelings of inadequacy, the inability to hold down a job with the bottom line feeling a longing for that sense of belonging. His whole family and their community were in dire need to overcome their addictions or face personal destruction.
Moyer says, “In 2016, we met J.P.’s twelve-year-old cousin, Curtis.” They found him to be a wonderfully happy, loving and intelligent young boy longing to avoid the family legacy of drug addiction. Moyer and Toensing were allowed to follow Curtis for six years, recalling, “His (Curtis’s) journey to adulthood became ours as filmmakers, to let viewers ask themselves: What if I were Curtis? Could I forge a path different from my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins like J.P.?”
The filmmakers interviewed a local police officer who has known Curtis’s family for thirty years and notes, “I estimate that Curtis’s situation represents up to 30 percent of all kids in the region.”
Moyer and Toensing hope that INHERITANCE creates a fervor for empathy and and understanding that could be a major start for change.