These Texas filmmakers found the meaning of Flag Day in a small, Midwestern town

There’s a big patriotic holiday coming up. No, not the Fourth of July — with this year marking the United States’ 250th birthday.

Flag Day is before that. It’s June 14, and though it may not really be on your radar, it’s been celebrated for 110 years now.

 However, no place celebrates it quite like the little town of Three Oaks, Mich. 

Texas filmmakers Andrew and Melissa Shea went up to check it out and shoot a documentary called “Flag Day,” set to screen in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Denton areas on June 14. It’s also showing in Austin on July 4. 

The filmmakers joined the Standard to talk about their new movie and the holiday behind it. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Well, let me start with the big question: Why a documentary about Flag Day?

Melissa Shea: Well, we have been spending our summers up in southwest Michigan for the past 13-14 years and we were looking for some help with our kids. We were editing a film at the time and I met a young woman who happened to say, “why don’t you come to our town? We’re having a parade.”

 The next day we went out and we just kind of fell in love with this parade that celebrated everyone in the town. There’s tons of tractors, the local band, and our new sitter was “Miss Three Oaks” and waving atop of the float. We kind of fell in love with both her and her family and the town. 

Tell me about Three Oaks, Mich. What do we need to know about it? 

Andrew Shea: It’s a farming town, but with a lot of gentrification in recent years. It’s about 70 miles from Chicago.

It is a complicated place with a long tradition and a long patriotic tradition. The first Flag Day parade there was in, I think, 1953, and they have claimed to have the largest — if not the longest-running — Flag Day parade in the nation. 

It sort of just occurred to us really as we were finishing up our last film that 2024, which was to be an election year of course, would be a really great opportunity to document the parade and what it means in the community and all the complexity — and that goes with celebrating the flag in a very fractured moment in American society today. 

We wanted to capture all of that, if we could, by really focusing our attention and the 11 camera crews that we brought from Chicago for that weekend on this one moment in time in Three Oaks.

Well, I want to ask you about something that happens 30 minutes into the film. And it really is this turning point of parade day.

We’ve been talking about the flag and we’ve seen glimpses of the flag, but then there’s this group of guys raising this enormous flag and the sun is like breaking through the clouds and you guys chose this music and I’m like, “Oh, I’m feeling moved by this.”

And then you pan over and there’s the locals who are watching this in real life and they all have tears in their eyes. They’re not hearing this music. You haven’t just created a movie moment. There’s also a real moment that they’re experiencing.

Can you talk about what that was all about and what you were witnessing in real life when that happened?

Melissa Shea: You know, that is one of my favorite moments of the film and probably the most unexpected. 

We had planned to film the flag-raising at the Legion and really didn’t know what to expect. We had our lead camera person, sound person with us and we were all kind of just speechless and a little surprised that we were so moved by it. It’s just so much of the care and the respect and understanding that these men that are raising it have served and women that are there.

 And then, to see how moved they were, that there were tears in their eyes is really, I think, something that I had never felt myself, and I was so honored to experience. 

It sounds like your familiarity with Flag Day maybe changed your perception of the image of the American flag and the years leading up to this, but I wonder what making this film or how the past year has changed the way that you see the American flag. 

Andrew Shea: If anything has changed over the years and in the making of this film, it’s just deepened my respect for people who’ve served. To me, it’s hard to separate the flag from service and from veterans. 

To experience the way we did, the warmth and the openness of the American Legion folks in Three Oaks and really open themselves up  — and with a sense of humor. There are plenty of moments in the film, including that great scene you’re talking about with the raising of the flag, when one or two of them — I don’t know if you can hear it, but it’s there in the soundtrack — saying, “we should probably put our drinks down before we do this.”

There’s a really lovely sense of human warmth that the veteran community has up there, as well as a deep reverence for the flag and for what it stands for. I think that the making of the film deepened my appreciation and respect for the people who serve.

Well, there’s a very subtle undertone of… I don’t know if you’d call it disagreement or division that you never explore in this film, right? There’s campaign signs, a little bit of talk about race, a Confederate flag sweatshirt…

Did you purposefully avoid division or did it just not rise to the surface and everybody really wanted to talk about coming together with Flag Day? 

Andrew Shea:  The choice we made was to not editorialize and not seek out talking heads, whether from within the community or experts in academics from outside the community. We didn’t seek out that sort of editorial discussion about that sense of division.

We chose to portray it on screen in a verite/observational fashion — allow people to draw their own conclusions. We certainly didn’t want to exclude those symbols of division. 

One of our cinematographers captured this candidate for sheriff confronting a woman in a Confederate flag shirt. We didn’t anticipate that moment. We had no idea it was gonna occur. When we saw that moment in the footage when we were reviewing the footage we certainly weren’t gonna exclude it, because it’s part of the fabric of the day, part of the complexity of the moment that we’re in.

So as you say, those moments are there, but we were trying to present them in a way that gets people to think about them, as opposed to telling people how to think about it. 

I guess as Flag Day approaches this year, it might be another day that a lot of people kind of take for granted or dismiss. Anything that you would say to them about maybe just a moment to stop and appreciate or to think about?

Melissa Shea: One thing we see in Three Oaks is just the how they show up — and not just for Flag Day, but throughout the year for each other. I think that it’s a lesson in how to be involved in your community and how to be graceful with your community despite differences. 

It would be nice if this serves as a lesson or an example of how to show up for each other. I think that Flag Day truly can be that. I think for Andrew and I, that’s what we’ve taken away. 

Andrew Shea: I think that’s well-put. I would only add, if there’s a message in the film… And we don’t think it’s a preachy film. We didn’t want it to be. We hope it’s not…

But Albert Brayboy Jr., one of the vets in the films, says early in the story that the flag is for everyone. It’s not Republican, it’s not Democrat — it’s for all of us.

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