Zhivko Illeieff, '11
Deep in the heart of Appalachia, stories are the threads that make up the community fabric. Residents gather to tell tales of family, of holiday memories, of the good old days, of home.
It’s the goal of Roadside Theater and its parent company, Appalshop, to capture these stories and share the history and lives of Appalachian people. Appalshop began in 1969 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Cameras were distributed to a dozen communities across the country, the idea being that young people would complete a curriculum and leave with a marketable skill. In Whitesburg, Ky., however, they skipped the curriculum and just started filming, creating a model for their work today.
In some ways, the story of Zhivko Illeieff, ’11, isn’t so different. As a student at Richmond, Illeieff received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant to fund a six-week venture to his home country of Bulgaria. Armed with a camera, he and Chuck Mike, ’11, set out to interview older Bulgarians about their experiences living under communism. The project was an effort to capture the stories for younger generations before they were lost.
They returned to produce the film, and Illeieff graduated the following summer, moving on to a corporate human resources job.
But that summer of stories stuck with him. Two years in, Illeieff felt lost in the corporate environment, missing the depth of personal interaction he now valued. “It wasn’t important for them to know who I was or what I believed, as long as I did my job,” he says. And so he left, with no plan for his next steps — just the gut feeling that he needed something more.
It wasn’t long before a job posting in Richmond’s Spider Connect database introduced him to the work of Roadside Theater, and soon Illeieff was sitting in a room in Norton, Va., talking with the staff.
“Our interviews were very casual,” he says. “I connected with them on a more spiritual and emotional level.”
Illeieff now works as the organization’s web community coordinator. He’s taking their collected videos, audio recordings, and other content, and digitizing them, as well as helping craft a plan to share the stories with communities far and wide. “Their goal is for this content to be freely available for people today and for future generations, for them to repurpose and reinvent this content in their own communities,” he says.
While Illeieff’s role at Roadside calls on his knowledge as a digital native to bring old stories to life online, he also feels that his generation has much to learn from the simple practice of sitting around and trading stories — in person.
“It’s interesting how my job is mostly in the digital space, but I can clearly see the shortcomings,” he says. “If I remain in this digital space for a long time, I can become disillusioned or apathetic about what’s happening in the world. We need more physical connections and we need to use the digital spaces as catalysts for those physical connections.”