DARK CELL HARLEM FARM
VIDEO, 2022, COLOR, SOUND, 26 MINUTES
Set against the backdrop of the long and brutal history of the Texas prison system–from Juneteenth to Covid–Dark Cell Harlem Farm explores the death by suffocation of eight Black men at a prison plantation in 1913. Combining readings of primary source materials and personal reflections by formerly incarcerated individuals, footage of the prison landscapes where the incident took place, a series of graphical interventions and excavations, and a haunting original score by composer (and Texas native) Zachary James Watkins, the film makes an urgent and uncompromising argument for the impossibility of prison reform and the necessity of prison abolition.
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado
Worker’s Unite Film Festival, New York, New York
Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival, Tolpuddle, UK (Jury Award: Best Documentary)
Maysles Documentary Center, Harlem, NY
International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), Bologna, Italy
Tacoma Film Festival, Tacoma, Washington
WE CANNOT LOVE WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW
(COLLABORATION WITH KELLY SEARS)
VIDEO, 2021, COLOR, SOUND, 4 MINUTES
Co-directed with the experimental animator Kelly Sears, We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know interrogates the Trump Administration's reactionary1776 Project, laying bare its cynical, divisive, and factually incorrect take on American history. Combining frantic and repetitive animations–of reinforcement, bunkering, and isolation–made from home improvement texts, with excerpts from the audiobook reading of the 1776 commission report, the film takes viewers on a chilling and phantasmagoric journey into the paranoid soulless soul of right wing historical propaganda.
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens, Ohio
Prismatic Ground, New York City, New York
Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Tacoma Film Festival, Tacoma, Washington
VIDEO, 2018, COLOR AND B&W, SOUND, 21 MINUTES
The 1971 Attica prison uprising is a signature moment of radical resistance for the American Civil Rights movement. The bloody retaking of the prison however, is an open wound. Utilizing rarely seen video recordings, Evidence of the Evidence explores this tortured history. It offers a visceral account of the events at Attica, and chronicles the mediation and narrativization of these events. In so doing, it reflects on the role that moving images play in the production of history and memory, its creation and its destruction.
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany
London Short Film Festival, London, UK (Jury Award: Best Documentary)
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado (Finalist: Best Short Documentary)
Camden International Film Festival, Camden, Maine
Indie Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Tacoma Film Festival, Tacoma, Washington
Big Muddy Film Festival, Carbodale, IL
VIDEO, 2014, COLOR AND B&W, SOUND, 5 MINUTES
Filmmaker Travis Wilkerson on NOW! AGAIN!:
"NOW! AGAIN! is a reenactment of a classic radical film, "Now!" by Santiago Alvarez, staged this summer in Ferguson, Missouri by the cops themselves. Playing themselves, the cops reenact their own vicious history as if they were checking their performance in a mirror shattered by gunfire. NOW! AGAIN! blows up at the intersection of an avant-garde film act and an urgent manifesto for militant action, demanding an end to police violence NOW!"
SELECTED SCREENINGS
New Orleans Film Festival, New Orleans, Louisiana
Saint Louis International Film Festival, Saint Louis, Missouri
Cachoeira Doc Fest, Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil
Show Me Justice Film Festival, Warrensburg, Missouri
Experimental Response Cinema, Austin, Texas
Other Cinema, San Francisco, California
VIDEO, 2016, COLOR, SOUND, 10 MINUTES
"A Costly Lesson is a strange, mournful bird: an artifact of a forgotten past that arrives on the schedule of this week’s newsreel. More of less, it constitutes the scant findings of Johnston’s investigations into the 1913 suffocation of 8 black convicts in a Texas prison. Yet rather than reading as a document of a past time, it reads like a transcript of our nightmare present: black teenagers in prison, abusive work conditions, racist cops, a murderous response to resistance, 8 dead teenagers . . . and nobody does anything about it. Johnston does what he can. He honors them with dignity, beauty, restraint. He answers the questions he can answer: who, where, when, how. The only missing interrogative is why. But he answers that too, almost automatically, by answering the preceding questions themselves. One of the true horrors of racism in the United States is that it obliterates questions of why as part of its existential firestorm. Simply say that a victim of violence in the United States is young, black, and poor, and we already know how the story will end. It’s a lesson we learn over and over. It’s a lesson we never seem to learn."
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Interference Archive, Brooklyn, New York
Other Cinema, San Francisco, California
YES - Ypsi Experimental Space, Ypsilanti, Michigan
NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis
VIDEO, 2010, COLOR AND B&W, SOUND, 40 MINUTES
The ghosts of America’s radical past make themselves known in Way down in the Hole. Enlisting contemporary interviews, archival materials and a propulsive musical score, this short documentary journeys to the heart of one of the most violent episodes in American labor history, the Great Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-1914. Indebted as much to Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA as to the gritty revisionist westerns of Sam Peckinpah, the film is a meditation on class struggle, national identity, and violent insurrection, played out across the wild frontier of the industrial American west.
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Bread and Roses Workers Cultural Center, Denver, Colorado
Miners Colfax Medical Center, Raton, New Mexico
San Francisco Labor Fest, San Francisco, CA
University of Colorado, Denver, CO
Not Fiction! A Screening of Experimental Documentaries, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
“Documented Italians” Film and Video Series, Queens College, CUNY, Manhattan, New York
VIDEO, 2009, COLOR AND B&W, SOUND, 10 MINUTES
An intimate portrait of legendary labor historian/activist and folklorist Archie Green, Learning to Bend Steel focuses on Green's early days as an aspiring shipwright on the dry docks of 1940's San Francisco. It is a meditation on the nature of labor, a chronicle of Green's early embrace of worker's culture, and a precious glimpse of San Francisco as a working class city, before its cultural annihilation at the hands of Silicon Valley tech oligarchs.
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Library of Congress, Washington, District of Columbia
On the Clock: A Playful Guide to Working Life, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California
San Francisco Labor Fest, San Francisco, CA
Labor and Working Class History Association National Conference, Chicago, Illinois
Reel Works Labor Film Festival, Santa Cruz, CA