Couple
hopes 7-year ‘Arabbers’ project bears fruit at festival
By MIKE CAGGESO
Daily Record/Sunday News
Saturday, May 7, 2005
A film festival is like a market produce
stand.
Both have fresh and exotic pickings not found in
your warehouse suburban outlet.
And the “producers” aren’t just
selling a product; they are selling something they spent all year
planting, nurturing, growing, clipping and picking.
Fruits and vegetables weren’t exactly what Stewartstown
residents Scott and Joy Kecken were thinking about when they entered
their movie, “We Are Arabbers,” in the Maryland Film
Festival, which continues through Sunday at three theaters in Baltimore.
But the parallels between the movie’s subject
and where it is being premiered are almost bludgeoning.
Their movie is a documentary that profiles the history
and modern plight of “arabbers,” Baltimore’s term
for horse-drawn produce sellers. In most places, they are known as “hucksters.”
“Baltimore is the last city that still has them,” said
Scott, a film and theater instructor at Villa Julie College in Maryland. “You
see them on the city street, and they are very visual. They holler
out what they have in their cart.”
Joy also has roots in film and TV production. She
is a writer and story editor for the HBO series “The Wire” and
has written for NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
The Keckens were shopping in Baltimore in 1997 when
they started talking with an arabber, a term Scott said isn’t
meant to be derogatory. It’s just what they are called in the
harbor town.
“It doesn’t refer to ethnicity. It refers
more to the fact that they are mobile,” he said.
After digging up as much huckster history as they
could, they began interviewing about a dozen of the wheeled merchants
in Baltimore in 1998.
Production on the movie was delayed because of changing
jobs, moving, running out of money and three rounds of editing, hence
the film’s debut seven years later.
