PORT ANGELES — A 2002 Port Angeles High School graduate and accidental filmmaker will bring her award-winning documentary to Port Angeles on Sunday.
Katie Skow’s “Ride with Larry,” which has won awards at the Monterrey (Mexico) International, San Diego and Orlando film festivals, revolves around her uncle’s 600-mile bicycle trip across South Dakota in 2011, more than 20 years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
A free showing of the film is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday at Olympic Medical Center’s Linkletter Hall, 939 E. Caroline St.
Skow is the daughter of John and Jeanne Skow of Port Angeles.
Becoming a film producer wasn’t part of Skow’s plan. Her first career was, and still is, social media marketing.
“I fell into it by accident,” she said.
She attended Eckerd College in Florida to study international relations and foreign languages before she was recruited by friends to help make an independent film, “The Dominguez,” about the history of “the Dominguez so-called family,” she said.
The 2010 film, which traced the family’s roots back to Los Angeles as early as the 1770s, was meant to be a family film, but it grew and had some success, so the team behind the film reunited to make another, with Skow and Matt Rubin as co-producers, Stephen Nemeth and Josh Haygood as executive producers, and Andrew Rubin and Skow’s husband, Ricardo Villarreal, as directors.
Skow said her uncle, Larry Smith, 65, of Vermillion, S.D., who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 23 years ago, has always been an inspiration, and it seemed natural to make a documentary film about him.
“It was going to be about ‘living well through attitude,’” she said.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects movement.
They began with simple film of her uncle at home. His wife, Betty, is a professor at the University of South Dakota, she said.
Soon Smith, a former law enforcement officer, began talking about wanting to make a cross-state bike ride, and the film was transformed.
While Smith has problems walking, he is able to ride a three-wheeled street tricycle known as a tadpole recumbent, which allows him to maintain fitness and provides stability.
Eventually, they mapped a 600-mile route across South Dakota, with visits to Parkinson’s centers along the way.
The message, Skow said, was that Parkinson’s “is a life sentence, not a death sentence.”
Smith chose the wheels of a trike, rather than those of a wheelchair, she said.
In addition to Smith, more than a dozen cyclists joined the ride to create a group that included the filmmakers, family members, neighbors and bicyclists who had family members affected by Parkinson’s.
“It was a huge undertaking,” she said.
When filming was completed and the finished product ready for the public, the filmmakers were thrilled with its reception, Skow said.
The film was shown at the San Diego Film Festival, where it was the only film to screen to a sold out audience.
It also won the audience choice award at the Orlando Film Festival and received several awards for most inspirational film at other film festivals that selected the documentary.
“It reignited the medical marijuana debate in Mexico,” Skow said.
Smith, who uses medical marijuana to reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, lives part-time in California, where he can legally purchase the drug.
He then has to travel back to his home in South Dakota, where it is not legal, and leave his medication behind, she said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsula dailynews.com.