One Thing in Nothing

In October 2017 the Tubbs Fire incinerated the city of Santa Rosa in Northern California, destroying more than 2,800 homes and killing 20 people. In the aftermath of the fire, filmmaker Whitney Legge offers a sensitive reflection from the perspective of children now left without a home. In tender voice-over, different children confide what they wish had been saved from the fire against black-and-white images of the remnants left behind in the ash. As a young child, it seems the whole world can exist within the house you live in. This film is a breath of what it means to recollect and be a child when everything that you once had is now gone. When the fire blazed through over 36,000 acres of Northern California, it turned out that the minutiae of one person’s world could really be one thing in nothing.  KL

 

GIVE

With a singular sound design, this short film documents Reverend Roland Gordon as he adds to an evolving archive at his church and community center—a building he has fought to have historically preserved amidst the quickly gentrifying city of San Francisco. A meticulous collage of portraits taken from photocopied images, periodicals, and other sources lines the interior walls, proudly displaying past and present achievements of African Americans. Started in the 1980s, Gordon’s decades-long oeuvre, titled Cloud of Witnesses, champions a new visual history created by and for its community.  KR

 

Mossville: When Great Trees Fall

“Welcome to beautiful downtown Mossville,” Stacey Ryan says wryly. “Population: one.” At one time, Mossville, Louisiana, was a thriving, self-sufficient, historically black community, teeming with gardens, grand fruit trees, and families. But since petrochemical industries started snatching up affordable real estate nearby, the community has begun to wither. Ryan’s neighbors begin to leave—at first one by one, then in droves—but he boldly refuses to budge. Soon he finds himself all alone. Surrounded by a smoldering, hellish industrial wasteland that has gobbled up Mossville’s once bucolic neighborhoods, he is cut off from power, supplies, and community. But Ryan stands his ground, even while living rough in his own home. This story of one man’s valiant resistance is at once intimately personal and vast in scope, exposing the links between race and environmental injustice, not just in the U.S. but across the globe.  TAW