Film on search to find, return an 'immigrant grape' to America reaches the home stretch
Lucie Morton and Stephan Balay have completed their multi-year prequel to their 2019 film. Getting it distributed comes next.
Lucie Morton said last week that her movie, “Immigrant Grapes / Odyssey of Forbidden Wines,” is finished.
Well, at least the production part of a film that serves as the prequel to “Vitis Prohibita,” which was released in 2019.
Both are the culmination of years of research by Morton, an internationally recognized author, ampelographer, lecturer and consultant who is based in Virginia, and her collaboration with French director and cinematographer Stephan Balay.
The key date, she said, was finishing by June 4, which gave them the steppingstone to begin looking for screening opportunities.
It’s a film built around Morton’s search for the Cunningham grape, one that grew two centuries ago in her native Virginia, and her desire to bring it back to grow in its former home. Per the movie summary, that grape has been found in the Cévennes Mountains of France and the Portuguese islands of Madeira, Santo Porto and Pico. You can watch the trailer at this link.
“[The movie] ended up being my personal story, with me talking in the first person,” she said, “so I had to write all of that. I got that done, and now I’m waiting to hear if Stephan wants me to do the European edition in French, which could happen this weekend, but we had to get it done by June 4 in order for him to take it what they call color grading. We’ve been working on this seven years, and we’ve got, you know, whatever, 160 videos from all over the place. And if you want to make a real feature film that you’re aiming for NPR and you know, the big screen, you have to take another step.”
Color grading, which is among the many facets of filmmaking that Morton has learned about during this dimension of her esteemed career, is the post-production process of altering and enhancing the color, contrast, and overall aesthetic of a movie. Balay was bringing it to a specialist in France.
“The guy who was doing it said, “Stephan, you either get me that movie by June 4th or November 4th, and, yea, listen, we’re both ready to be done with it.”
That early June date for what will be Balay’s last film was also important to try to meet the June 30 deadline to enter it into the Virginia Film Festival, one of a number of screenings they hope to snag for this movie.
For Morton, it will mark a still-young calendar year that has had its share of challenges, with so many of the vineyards that she consults suffering extensive damage when a freeze hit much of the East Coast early on the morning of April 21.
“I don’t even call it a frost,” she said. “It was a freeze. This was bad.”
The acronym for the movie is IGO, for Immigrant Grape Odyssey, “I go,” said Morton, “and, boy, what an adventure it was. And it needed a wine movie, and I don’t know of any other wine movie that’s all about the grapes and not about the wine. We set the tone, like instead of [the Apple TV hit] ‘Drops of God,’ which is swishy-swishy, clinky-clinky, reader glasses in London and Paris and bladhy-blah and sniffy-sniffy. It opens up with me, and I know I’m no Gina Lollobrigida, tasting Cunningham wine in Porto Santo out of a juice glass. So right there, we set the tone of, this isn’t about [just] grapes, this is about immigration and discrimination, and all that good stuff, but it’s the grapevine version of that history.
“I’m excited about it. I don’t want to get too excited, but … if it gets in the Virginia Wine Festival, we’re good to go. I did talk to the people at Ken Burns about where we pay Getty Images and all; we have a little seven seconds on Prohibition, it’s good to sprinkle in a little historic footage, and, you know, I just did a cold call on the internet to Ken Burns Inc., and said, hey, this my name, this is my question. We’re doing a movie about a lost Virginia grape, I know this is a Hail Mary, and if you’ve read this far, I’d love to hear from you. The guy called me the next day from Ken Burns, and after talking to me, he said, ‘This is perfect for NPR, and if you need help with that and regional NPR, and how you navigate it, call me back.’ I’m like, alrighty now.”
Morton and Balay can only hope this movie replicates the 2019 success of “Vitis prohibita,” which, among others, won best feature film at international vine and wine festival Oenovideo, France, and best director at the Alive Documentary Film Festival in L.A. A full list of the award for this documentary, a story on resistamnt and forbidden grape varieties, can be found at this link.
Nabbing a spot in the Virginia Film Festival alone will be a major achievement, with it receiving, she said, about 850 entries and choosing 50 out of those to show.
“Listen, it’s just me and Stephan. I had a few donors, like 12, and they’re a mixed group, and none of them is in the movie,” she said. “So this is not going to come across as a rah-rah Eastern industry promotional film. It’s me and Stephan telling the story we wanted to tell, and I paid my way as I went along.”
One part covered in the film is a backstory that’s almost too hard to believe. Morton said they took cuttings from Cunningham vines in France and sent them to Cornell for virus elimination with the eventual goal of planting them in Virginia, maybe even around the time the movie was released. Except, she said, in 2025 she got a call from Cornell informing her that they had been mistakenly sprayed with pesticide rather than herbicide and had died.
It made her decision to coordinate having a cutting of Cunningham vines from Madeira and, on behalf of the University of Missouri, sent to US Davis in 2022 look quite intuitive.
“They have been completely nice, they let us film,” she said of the staff at US Davis, “so we have in our movie Cunningham growing in the Davis greenhouses and growing in little test tubes, and then delivering the bad news, that well, maybe your New York [cutting] only had one virus, this has eight, so it’s probably going to take us another five years. But at least that all got in the movie.
“It’s been an adventure,” she concluded, “and I guess I needed Stephan to sort it through and say the only thing we’re going to talk here is about your journey to find and rescue Cunningham. We’re not going into the French hybrids, and we’re not anti-vinifera in any way. … This is not a viticultural polemic at all … it’s more really [about] the history.”
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