Hello friends,
We just landed in the Bay Area and are catching our breath after a seriously full 6 weeks on this western coast. There’s a lot to share.
In September we made our way to Los Angeles and started interviewing two groups: Reclaiming Our Homes and the OVAS.
Reclaiming Our Homes (ROH) will be featured in the opening Fire chapter. The passion they bring to growing strong networks of support to defend their direct action work is so fire. Please check them out and link up with them on social media. They’re currently waging a campaign for resignation from racist politicians on the LA city council. But they’ve been fighting back against the city’s racist and anti-houseless policies for years by occupying a series of vacant homes owned by the state’s transportation authority. It’s a long story of resistance and mutual aid and we’re very excited to share some insight into it through our interviews with them.
The OVAS, or the Ovarian Psychos, are an anarchist feminist collective committed to creating radical spaces of care that resist patriarchy, racism, and gentrification in their hood. They’ll be included in the Water chapter. Their interviews focus on what community means to them, how they’ve traversed burnout and trauma together, and what it looks like to build a space of communal refuge and resistance. One of their members and our dear friend, Xela, designed us some killer bandanas on the fly for our next fundraising campaign. *heart-eyes emoji*
In the middle of shooting all these interviews, we also attended the International Documentary Association’s Getting Real conference. There’s a lot of reflections to share there, so we’ll share some more details about that experience in our next post.
Right after these three busy weeks in LA, we dropped straight down to Tijuana and met up with folks with Contra Viento y Marea (CVM). We had to reschedule this visit because of cartel/military/police tensions coming to a head in mid August. We’re deeply grateful we ended up being able to make it down and meet the beautiful souls coordinating this project. CVM is a community kitchen and migrant/houseless resource space born out of the 2018 migrant caravan. They hold their project down with fierce hearts and deep commitment to horizontality amid corrupt militarized state forces, violently rampant cartel networks, the deadly border, and an ever-growing migrant crisis. CVM’s interviews will fall into the Air chapter. Their inclusion in this chapter helps demonstrate creative ways to gather resources for distribution, encourage involvement from people receiving aid, and make decisions with fluidity and consensus all in a high stakes environment.
Phew. Ok, that brings us to Oakland. We really would have broken this up into more posts if we’d the time to write them.
Now that we’re in Oakland, we’re thankfully slowing down a little while we interview Arm the Girls. Arm the Girls (AKA We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For) has been doing amazing work since late 2020 getting their community of trans femmes skilled up in self defense and meeting their material/financial needs through ballroom events and stun gun distros. Give them a follow! They’re hot and so badass. We’re having a very good time while on the clock here; we’ve been attending Dia de Los Muertos and halloween raves and balls to film their members organizing and DJing radical, celebratory, trans spaces.
After Oakland, our tour really slows down. We have a few groups to meet back up with on our way back down south. And then we’ll spend the winter primarily in Houston beginning the editing process. Production tour’s been a blast, and we’d be crying about it coming to an end if we didn’t have another short leg of filming to do out east in the spring. In the coming months we’ll also be putting together a sample reel of our work and working on launching a crowdfunding campaign.
We’ll drop another post about our experiences and thoughts from the International Documentary Association conference very soon.
As winter creeps closer, we’re feeling cozy in our van and feel the warm love of our comrades, supporters, and relations across the globe.
Thanks again for following along.
