Documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Barret calls her creative process an extension of "homegrown media." Barret, who hails from Appalachian Kentucky, spent the past seven years touring the nation with a documentary about her native mountain culture, hosting screenings and collecting anecdotal responses to the piece.

Tonight she'll be in Ann Arbor with the doc, "Stranger With a Camera," and will head a discussion of her home region and its representation in the media.

Barret works with a nonprofit media education center called Appalshop, established in 1969 during Appalachia's war on poverty. Though several similar battles were launched in different states, all in areas of high unemployment, the Kentucky location latched onto a national trend when it started producing socially relevant films.

Though Appalshop was originally intended to provide vocational training during a time of economic hardship, a group of its young filmmakers wanted more than jobs - they wanted change.

Barret was among the first class of pupils to graduate from the program. At Appalshop, she found others like herself who wanted to amend the largely negative, one-dimensional media stereotypes of Appalachia, and they began producing films that celebrated the artistic traditions of small-town mountain culture.

Barret started off her career with "Quilting Women," a film about a storyteller, then went on to make documentaries about women coalminers and the migration of people to and from the Appalachian mountains.

The unique thing about the artistic endeavors at Appalshop, Barret says, is that the center is comprised "primarily of local artists, working on issues regarding the community."

"Stranger with a Camera" tells two stories, one of the people of Whitesburg, Ky. and another of a specific tragedy that occurred there in 1967. The "stranger with a camera" is Hugh O'Conner, a documentary filmmaker who came to Appalachia in the '60s to work on a project and was murdered by a local farmer while filming on the man's property.

Like every child in the area, Barret grew up with the story of this filmmaker as a cautionary tale. Her documentary "became a vehicle for the community to revisit the event with thirty years' distance."

The first showing of "Stranger With a Camera" took place in Appalshop's screening room, with an audience of 150 people from the area, reexamining the tragedy in a personal light. For Barret, it created "a path for dialogue for people to look at the event in new ways."

Responses to the film soon seeped out of Appalachia, and "Stranger With a Camera" gained national attention. It was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 and achieved acclaim both among the media circuit and in academia.

The documentary is more than just the story of a man and how his tragic death affected the Appalachian community. It also explores filmic representation in general - of the filmmaker's relationship to her subject, of her responsibility to the community and the inherent change in the nature of the object in the transition from life to screen.

Elizabeth Barret has devoted 10 years to the "Stranger With a Camera" project, but the interest has been a lifetime in the making.

She's now working on a documentary about the photographic legacy of William Gedney, a photographer who died of AIDS in 1989. She's also in the process of an international media exchange with filmmakers in Indonesia. But Appalshop has remained her top priority.

"Stranger With a Camera" will show tonight in auditorium two of the MLB at 7 p.m.