FARMINGTON – A film crew and a reporter from a German national TV station were here this week to record small town life in Maine against the backdrop of the U.S. elections.
Veteran TV reporter Sonia Mikich of ARD National Public Network’s program “Monitor,” with help from videographer Joe McCarthy and sound man Ron Mehu, shot scenes in and around Farmington. Mikich, the host of Monitor, a hard-hitting, investigative TV program akin to “60 Minutes” is assigned to work for three months from the network’s headquarters in New York City. Normally based in Cologne, her job description changed somewhat when she was assigned to cover election stories that illustrate the feel and temperament of Americans in this particularly revved up election season.
“I didn’t want to do the extreme stories of this election. You know, covering the stereotypical stories or the far-out radicals,” Mikich said. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to do a story here.” A veteran of 15 summers on Clearwater Lake, she knew the area would fit the small town perspective she needed.
Mikich and crew visited the Obama headquarters in Farmington and watched the local Democratic Party volunteers work the phones. She found the energized, one-on-one phone conversations that took place and were not “just people parroting the party line,” she said. “Here, it’s a positive thing to be politically motivated and involved.”
They also attended a trade show at the Augusta Civic Center, stopped by Reny’s (she loves it) and filmed Paul McGuire of Farmington, hand building another canoe to show a slice of hard-working Mainers.
Mikich interviewed a soldier fresh from the battlefields of Iraq who told her that he never wanted to leave Maine again after seeing so much horror.
“Maine is like a safety blanket,” he said to her.
The crew also stopped by the Daily Bulldog to see what starting a newspaper took, noting that there is no such thing as small community newspapers in Germany. Mikich said there are only the national dailies that focus on covering the big news and unless something big happens in a small town, it goes unreported.
She described Franklin County’s people as being “kind, very hands-on and straightforward. They’ll tell you what they think.”
In general, Americans, she said, are an optimistic lot. It’s a characteristic she contrasted with the idea that things are bad and are only going to get worse, not better, that she feels is the general mood in Germany. “Here, if there are obstacles, people say, “I want to overcome them,” Mikich said. “I like that.”
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