A New York Times feature contrasts next week’s PBS doc, Country Boys, with predictable accounts of the poverty cycle. “Everyone wants things to be all black and white, but with me everything is nuance,” Sutherland says. Shot in 1999-01, the project debuts Jan. 9 on Frontline. The filmmaker estimates it’s “a half-million dollars over budget, and two and a half years late.” Current
profiled the project and two other Appalachian doc series in 2004. Sutherland is known for the earlier observational doc, The Farmer’s Wife, aired in 1998. Sutherland says he still gets 30 e-mails a week about that series.