Mentone filmmaker’s “Making Room” Finds National Audience

Doors close, one after another, in the opening moments of Katherine Dudley Blair’s documentary “Making Room: Faith in Action.” The meaning of this imagery is unmistakable. For children shuffled from place to place, stability can disappear with the swing of a door.

“The doors get closed in their faces over and over,” Blair said.

For the Mentone filmmaker, the sequence is more than a visual device. It leads into a story she understands in a personal way: what it means for a child not to know where home will be.

“Making Room,” now streaming nationally on Angel, follows the work of Cedartown, Georgia’s Safe Haven, a Christian ministry created to give children from difficult circumstances a stable, family-style home. The documentary has also earned recognition on the festival circuit, including the Documentary Audience Award at the International Christian Film Festival in Orlando. It isn’t Blair’s first film but it is the first to reach a national audience. “People watched it and they liked it,” she said of the audience award. “That was pretty cool.”

At the center of the film is the story of a boy who needed a secure place to land and found more than shelter. He found people willing to love him and give him a sense of belonging. Capturing stories like his required Blair to resist the natural urge to step into an emotional moment. A documentary filmmaker, she said, has to make room for silence, grief, and honesty. “These stories are real. The tears are real. The thing about documentaries is you just have to let it go. You have to ask the question and let them keep going and get those emotions out. Because that’s where the story is.”

Her Own Experiences

Blair knows something about the uncertainty behind those emotions. A New Jersey native and one of five children, she grew up in a family that struggled financially. Her parents had not finished high school, and the family moved about 18 times before she graduated. Three days before graduation, the house where they were living was condemned. “I was literally homeless when I graduated high school,” she said.

Blair is careful not to compare her childhood with the experiences of the children featured in the film. Still, the instability stayed with her. “I know what it’s like,” she said. “Maybe not to their level. I don’t want to compare my life to theirs. But … I feel for kids who don’t have a safe place to live.”

Her connection to the subject deepened when she became a foster parent. By the time she began work on “Making Room,” she understood both the needs of children without stable homes and the challenges facing the adults trying to care for them.

The documentary grew from a story Blair had begun telling years earlier. Her film “Making a Difference” focused on the Community Share Ministry, the umbrella organization associated with Safe Haven. At the time, the children’s ranch existed mainly as an idea.

“They had the land but there was nothing there,” Blair said. “It was just overgrown woods.” She introduced the proposed ranch near the end of that first film, then moved on. Six years later, by then living in Mentone, she felt drawn back to the story. At first, she resisted.

“God was calling me to do another one about Safe Haven,” she said. “I kept running from God, literally running from God.” Eventually, she agreed to return. “I was like, ‘Okay, God, I can’t make it without you, though. Let me know what you want me to do.’”

Blair spent about a year on the documentary, giving the production time to follow Safe Haven through construction and development. She hired a professional crew to film and edit while she wrote, directed, produced, and pursued distribution.

The film also reaches across the state line to Big Oak Ranch, the established Alabama children’s ministry that helped guide Safe Haven’s leaders as they developed their program. That relationship gives the title another dimension. “Making Room” refers to houses, bedrooms, and seats at a family table, but also to something less tangible: the decision to open a life and a community to children who need a place in both.

It also reflects the unconventional path Blair took to filmmaking.

Before college, she served in the New Jersey Air National Guard. She enrolled as a student at 26 and became the first person in her family to earn a college degree. She went on to earn four degrees from three universities, including a master of fine arts in film production from Full Sail University in Florida.

Her career began in K-12 education, where she spent eight years teaching television broadcasting and seven years as an assistant principal. While living in North Carolina, she began picking up work on film sets as an extra, stand-in, and behind-the-scenes crew member.

“I just fell into the film industry because it was happening,” she said.

She entered Full Sail’s intensive film program in her 40s, determined to understand the work well enough to teach every part of it. While there in 2015, she won the prestigious Telly Award for writing and directing a documentary short, “The Perfect Selfie,” about the dangers of taking selfies. “More people died while taking selfies than shark attacks in 2015,” she said.

In 2017, Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, offered her a faculty position. She had prayed that if she was ready to teach film, she would accept the first job offered. After three rounds of interviews, she took the position without visiting the campus. Now in her 10th year at Shorter, Blair loves teaching communication studies and digital production, covering the filmmaking process from scriptwriting and pre-production to editing, post-production, and media law. Her workdays take her from her home on Lookout Mountain to Rome, but Mentone has become more than a place to commute from.

Blair has lived in Mentone for about four years but she’s been connected to the area for roughly eight through her marriage to Jamie Blair, whose children, Sophia and Ian, graduated from Valley Head. She has come to see stories in the community around her, just as she saw one taking shape in the overgrown woods at Safe Haven.

The response to “Making Room” suggests that others see something in the story too. Since the film’s release, Blair said, Safe Haven has received calls and emails, including inquiries from outside the United States, from people interested in learning more, offering support or contributing to the ministry.

Fundraising was not Blair’s primary aim. She wanted the film to show what is possible. Big Oak Ranch provided a model for Safe Haven; now, she hopes, Safe Haven can help another community begin. “They want to help other people to get started if they have this vision,” Blair said. “They just want to pass it on.”

In addition to her work on “Making Room,” Blair has created numerous narrative short films just for the sheer love of the process, occasionally submitting them to film festivals. She isn’t rushing to choose her next documentary topic. When the right project comes, she would like to spend more of her time on the parts of filmmaking she loves most, writing and directing, and letting a hired crew handle the rest.

One possible subject is already outside her door. Near the end of an interview, Blair spoke affectionately about Mentone, its history, people, and the stories entwined in the community. For a resident whose latest film began with doors closing, perhaps that is a fitting place to leave the story: waiting to see which door opens next.

To watch the film, visit www.angel.com/movies/making-room-faith-in-action