A Celebration of Community at a Time of Division in Flag Day Doc

Where’s the biggest Flag Day celebration in America? If you thought Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, you’d be wrong. Same if you went with some major military town. It’s actually the tiny city of Three Oaks, Michigan (pop. 1,370), where locals put together a massive parade every June 14 to celebrate the overlooked patriotic holiday. Now that community event is the subject of Flag Day, the new Austin-created film opening at Violet Crown Cinema this weekend.

The documentary comes from husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Andrew and Melissa Shea (Portrait of Wally, I’ll Be There) but actually was set in motion by Andrew’s day job. Many UT grads know him best as a professor at the Moody College of Communication, but around 12 years ago he was approached by Notre Dame to take a job there. Melissa said, “As part of the courting, they said, ‘Check out southwest Michigan, Harbor Country,’ which we did and kind of fell in love with it.”

While Andrew ultimately passed on the job offer, they started vacationing on Lake Michigan and finally bought a property there, “just so we could get out of Austin in the summer,” Melissa said. Working on a different project up there, they hired a young woman who had just graduated high school to help look after the kids. “She said, ‘Come over to my town, we have a parade on Flag Day.’ We had no idea what Flag Day was, so we went and she was on top of the float, waving as Miss Three Oaks.”

Credit: Courtesy of Alyce Henson

Charmed by Three Oaks, every year they would go to the Flag Day celebration. As is often the way with documentarians, this new family tradition eventually became the subject of their next film. Andrew said, “This idea arrived to us, a complete idea to make an observational documentary about the Flag Day parade but really about community and bridging different kinds of divides that we saw taking place.”  

It was important to them to feature the huge diversity of participants in the 2024 Three Oaks Flag Day celebration, from father and son veterans, the Braybors, to the new Miss Three Oaks, Mya Thomas, to the members of the River Valley Antique Tractor Club, and dance director Lyn Isbell and her Michigan City Soul Steppers. “Melissa and I curated that mix pretty carefully over the prior year, trying to find a real diverse cross section of ages and backgrounds, people who’d been there 80 years, people who’d only been there a few years.”

The documentary marks Melissa’s feature directorial debut, as she co-directed with Andrew. Explaining why she made the shift now, Melissa said that, with their kids either in or heading to college, “I just had more time. I had always wanted to return to directing at some point in time but had focused on editing and producing in my career because that was what I was able to do and raise a family at the same time.”

Andrew called the change “a natural evolution. … We’ve been collaborating since we were in film school 30 years ago, and she’s been editing my films and producing while I’ve been directing, but with this film we co-produced, co-edited, co-directed, side by side, right through the whole process.”

In part, the decision also came from the sheer scale of the production. While Flag Day feels intimate and handheld, their plan to look at as many participants as possible during the parade was going to require a huge crew. Andrew said, “We had 11 splinter crews. Just DPs, a lot of whom were directors in their own right, and sound recordists, and we essentially paired them up with our main subjects.”

An Austin-based filmmaking duo trying to assemble a team this large in rural Michigan may sound like a challenge. Luckily, they had the assistance of their old friend and Andrew’s former student and colleague, Kyle Henry (Time Passages, Rogers Park). Now an associate professor at Northwestern University in nearby Chicago, he connected the Sheas with Margaret Byrne, an experienced documentarian, DP, and adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago. Andrew said, “Margaret became the creative hub. She knew everybody in Chicago, and she put us in touch with all these DPs and sound people.”

Lyn Isbell, founder and director of the Michigan City Soul Steppers Credit: Courtesy of Alyce Henson

Once they were on the ground, Andrew said, “The charge we gave the DPs was essentially, ‘Try to create miniature Frederick Wiseman films.’ It wasn’t about the parade. We wanted to capture the dramas, moments of humor, behind, during, and within the parade.”

The project isn’t quite over yet. The couple’s next film is a spin-off, focusing on Isbell. “She’s such a force of nature,” Andrew said, “and we were just so drawn to her.” He described it as “a profile of her 25 years leading this very inspiring community organization,” but they won’t be directing. Instead, they will be producing, and Eric Seals – a rising Black documentarian in Chicago and one of the multiplicity of DPs that filmed the parade and the people – will helm the project. Andrew said, “We’re really excited about the work that he’s doing.”

Flag Day screens Sept. 24-26 at Violet Crown Cinema. Tickets available at austin.violetcrown.com.

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