Hi friends,
It’s been too long since we shared any updates. We’ve been deep in editing all this time while balancing life, struggle, and mutual aid in our own communities. It hasn’t really felt like we’ve had much news, but there are a couple exciting highlights to share.
We ended up raising the $10,000 for our animation. Almost all of that we pulled together through landscaping gigs. It felt great to put more blood and sweat into this project. We just recently finalized our storyboards with our animator, María Medem, and she’s started working through them. We can’t wait to see her art come to life. It’s going to bring people’s words and stories to life in such a dynamic way.
As for our score, we spent some time this fall finding the right sounds for the series with our composer Álvaro Domene. He’s such a godsend to this project. It’s incredible, he’s scoring the entire series. We’re so grateful for his excitement and love for this project. He’s hard at work blessing the chapter drafts we’ve sent to him with musical depth and energy.
As for editing, we’re just about to finalize the last two chapters’ rough drafts. We had a bit more filming to do over the summer and fall (and still have one last interview to cross off the list).
Mid summer we also decided to add in an entirely new component to the film: interludes of mini interviews done with some of our closest comrades here in southeast Michigan. These mini interviewees will be spliced together and introduce some of the heady questions our audience will grapple with as they watch the main content. They’ll offer small reprieves and assurance that these topics are challenging and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this work. Seeing these come together has been … well, we don’t even have words for it. It’s the biggest treat. We tear up all the time when we review these. Can’t wait for y’all to see them, too.
We finally moved out of the van and back into our old collective house when a spot opened back up in August. That’s been a huge help to our mental health and ability to sustain work on this project. We also took some time off from editing to show up for Palestine organizing and for folks and projects around us that we want to be engaged with. It’s really wild to work on a project this long. It’s been over 3 years of doing our best to put as much of ourselves into this series as possible.
We’re still on track to have this thing published in summer of 2025. There’s a lot to do to get there. Soon enough we’ll start booking the screening tour for the summer and fall and will let y’all know when we make those plans. We’re pretty confident the tour will come at a time when it will resonate with a lot of people hungry for this sort of material.
As for distribution, for a long while we’ve been waffling between premiering on streaming platforms (Means.TV, Cinema Politica, and New Day Films) or just getting it up on YouTube. More and more it feels like it would reach the most people at such a crucial moment in this empire’s death throes if we just got it to YouTube. We’ll share more about our ideas for our release in another post.
We’re still looking for photos and videos of mutual aid efforts to help show off all the different ways this work can look if you want to share any with us.
We’re also eagerly looking for a track to use for our intro that we have copyright permission to use. We’d love something that has this sort of sound to it. If you know of any rad political musicians who might fit that description, please please get in touch!
As always, thanks for your support and excitement for the series. This moment in history is dark but also ripe with opportunity for widening the cracks in the dominant system’s facade. How we show up for each other and build capacity to fight with mutual aid is critical. We’re ever hopeful that this series will come just at the right time and help hone our collective agency for liberation.
Our struggle is beautiful, righteous, and timeless. Keep practicing deep care for each other in these uncertain times.