RESOURCES:
The Ann Arbor Black Film Festival (A2BFF)
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU. Today, we are talking about the third annual Ann Arbor Black Film Festival, which takes place in June. With me today are festival director Chris Anderson, Michael Soenen, he's the CEO of Nothing to See Here Productions, and Yehuda Sharim. He is the director of "Where's My Coffee Cup?" First of all, welcome to all of you!
Chris Anderson: Thank you, Caroline! I appreciate you being here!
Yehuda Sharim: Pleasure being here!
Caroline MacGregor: Chris, I'll turn to you first. What's taking place this year at the annual Ann Arbor Black Film Festival?
Chris Anderson: Certainly! Thank you so much! So, this year, the Ann Arbor Black Film Festival is going to be a three-day event starting on June 5th at the Ann Arbor District library. We'll be showing films at the State Theatre and Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor on Saturday, June 6th. And June 7th, we'll be finishing at the Ann Arbor District Library downtown branch as well. We have a lot of incredible films about not just the Black journey and by Black storytellers, but also films that talk about our social justice system, specifically, and just how we can be better in organizing community, treating each other as a community, learning to talk with each other, and how we treat those incarcerated. And we have these two great filmmakers here with me today to definitely expound more on that. And I'm really grateful that they both could offer films to our show. We got an incredible field of films. I do have to highlight a film called "I Promise You Paradise" from Cairo, Egypt. And basically, it's about this young Black African who has this young child, and he is helping his significant other and the child cross into the border and find ways to leave their sort of war-torn area. It's a really visceral film, and it was included in the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. So, I'm really super excited to have that a part of the show. But we have a lot of great narrative films and documentary films that really, I think, show the breadth of culture that you can experience during Ann Arbor's cultural festival.
Caroline MacGregor: Well, thank you! I'm going to turn to Michael Soenen. Michael, you're the CEO, as I mentioned of Nothing to See Here productions. And you worked on a film called "Nothing to See Here: Watts," which sounds fascinating. This was set in LA.
Michael Soenen: Yes. "Nothing to See Here: Watts," which is in Watts, California. That's a small, 2.1-square mile community in south Los Angeles.
Caroline MacGregor: Tell me about what inspired you to make this film, how you got involved, because we were talking a little bit beforehand. It just sounds incredible what you discovered, not far from your own neighborhood.
Michael Soenen: Yes, five miles from my home and I had been doing some non-profit work in the community. And as a thank you for that work, the police had offered me to do a ride along in Watts at night. And so, I went out with the police, and two things happened. One, I saw three people get shot, and one guy died. None of it was on the news. And in some ways, more profound, I was speaking with a gang member, and I asked him what made him join the gang. And he told me that his mother put him in the gang when he was eight because they offered free daycare while she worked. And I just had this takeaway that like, "Wow!" Here's this place five miles from my house, and while I think I'm well-read and I think am well-resourced and understand these issues, I clearly did not understand them and was curious to learn more.
Caroline MacGregor: So, this film centers around rival gang members, police officers, victims of violence, kids just trying to survive. Tell me a little bit more about the process of the film itself and the gangs themselves and how you managed to get all these people involved.
Michael Soenen: Yeah, it was really crazy, right? So, I'm not a filmmaker, and I didn't even start out with the intention of making a film, but I just wanted to learn more. So, I went out and bought 20 iPhones, and I started handing them out to gang members, police officers, priests, prostitutes, kids, anybody who would take them. I asked 200 people and found 20 people who would actually take the phones and record their lives. And you can imagine there's a lot of distrust, right? Like, maybe I'm trying to set them up or what's this or whatever. But everybody thought, "Oh, for sure those phones are stolen." And at the end of the day, they turned in 200 hours of the most insane footage you could ever imagine. Of course, I was the only one watching the footage, and I had the luxury of it. But I felt I was wrong person to try to shape or craft the story, right? And so, I'm not from the community. It's not my story. So, I came up with kind of a second portion of the project, which was I told them I would build them the infrastructure to turn it into whatever they wanted--a film. But they had to be the film's directors, and there would be one rule, which was they all had to agree on the final cut. Correct. We've been on a nationwide thing. We started out with the King Center. Dr. Bernice King hosted us for MLK Day. We just got back from Harvard University. And then, we're going to Ann Arbor for the film festival there. And then, we'll be doing stops throughout Detroit, Kalamazoo and Chicago on the way back to the West Coast.
Caroline MacGregor: Yehuda, you are a writer, filmmaker, a poet, and a photographer, and you worked on a film called "Where's My Coffee Cup?" Tell us about this.
Yehuda Sharim: First, I'm really honored to be here and share this space with all of you! "Where's My Coffee Cup" was written by John, who has been incarcerated for the last 34 years and is expected to die in prison. It's a story about John, and it's a story about some of the fastest growing population in the U.S. prisons, which are men and women who are beyond the age of 50, but expected to died in a place that cannot accommodate to their needs. We're talking about men and women who have been incarcerated for so many years, not giving a second chance. The film was written by John, and then, we took the film and myself, Margaret Braslow, the Coalition for Justice in Virginia, the film was filmed in Virginia and turned it into the community. The community told their own stories. Most of the people in the film have been incarcerated themselves. And we talk about, just like as John is doing in his script, about what does it mean to age prison. What does it mean to stand in the pill line for hours? What does that mean when you're a coffee cup, your only coffee cup where you're identified with, the only thing that you have has been taken away because the warden thinks the mug is too thick. So, the only things you have is taken away from you. And then what? What does this mean when your daughter refuses to visit you, and you don't even know the names of your grandchildren or you never met them? And in a way, the film is a portrait of our society--our obsession with punishment, with fear, and maybe this is the right time to talk, to send our condolences to the Muslim community in San Diego. We are surrounded with endless cruel acts of violence. And the film allows us to stay with John and humanize our stories and talk about how we are all implicit if we are not doing anything, if we're not looking, if we aren't listening in our society and values and ethics that are at the heart of our life together here. So, this is "Where's my Coffee Cup?" It's a 30-minute long film, won numerous awards, whatever awards mean. We're constantly traveling and all the rest.
Caroline MacGregor: And, Yehuda, you are Jewish. Correct?
Yehuda Sharim: I am Jewish. Correct. I'm Jewish, but I'm so many different things. There's so many things beyond being Jewish. I'm an Arab Jew, meaning I'm a son of refugees from Iran who arrived to Israel in the '50s. I'm the son of a father who has been illiterate and forced out of school at the age of eight. I'm his son, I'm a first-gen, I'm at faculty, I am a professor. I'm a filmmaker. And the reason I highlight all those titles is because I never grew up with a camera. It was never afforded. So, I am Jewish, and I'm also crossing so many bridges because of my nuanced understanding of Jewish identity and its relationship to Muslim communities and so on.
Caroline MacGregor: And I think that's the reason I asked was that the fact that you did extend your condolences to the Muslim community in San Diego. You know, that's inspiring because there are so many bridges.
Yehuda Sharim: Most of the communities, the incarcerated communities, I've been working with from Hassan Shabazz, Shaquille Ali and others are Muslim. The first thing we talked about is about me being Jewish, engaging in conversation. The next film we are doing is about how incarceration impacts communities, not only those who are behind bars, but actually the communities and the families. And that conversation about seeing each other beyond labels, seeing each other beyond being Jewish or Muslim or incarcerated or undocumented or whatnot is one of our most greatest challenge right now. And I think that's what both Michael's project and mine have in common: the ability to have a space for conversation and also thinking about a space where we actually not only see each other, but also listen to one another, engage in deep listening and offer a space. And I that is how it relates to healing. When we are able to listen, we are also able to heal. Most of us are so overwhelmed by fear and paranoia, especially in a society that is all we are consuming is suspicion and anger and anxiety.
Caroline MacGregor: Michael, would you agree? I mean, the film that you've made, you've seen the depths of despair. Do you see your film or cinema as a path to healing?
Michael Soenen: Well, it certainly has been for that community, right, to imagine that the police officers are working with the gang leaders and the victims. I mean, you have a homicide detective whose brother and sister were murdered by the gangs, working with gang leaders. You have Lawanda Hawkins, whose son was murdered by gangs. And she says, it's very clear in the film, they say, "We will never forgive you." She says, "But I will work with you to make sure that the next generation of kids don't get killed." And this idea that they've chosen, just by getting in the room and understanding each other's stories in deep detail, and that's with them doing all this editing together did. They ended up learning each other. They learned how he became a gang member. They learned they became an abusive officer. And it created a sense of empathy between them, right, empathy without forgiveness. And now to think that we travel the country together, this group of people who are mortal enemies four years ago now work together. And then, the outcome is what's amazing. There've been a hundred homicides in the three years that they filmed, and they've had no gang-related homicides for 18 months. No new buildings, no new laws, no policies, right? Everybody got in the room and, like he just said, they had the ability through the process to learn and understand each other and then choose a different path for their community. Can other communities replicate that? That's something that is yet to be determined, but I really believe they can. I really that it can be done.
Caroline MacGregor: Yehuda, you stated listening is imperative to understanding, and that's what both you and Michael seem to agree on. The understanding of the human being, why they act the way they do. This seems like the path to healing, if only more of us could do this because we're just so inundated with all these accusatory messages.
Michael Soenen: Yeah, I mean, for me, I think the hope then is that getting everybody in the room, letting them understand each other really bridged the gap that when you rely on other people's narratives, you tend not to bridge, right? It's hard to make someone your enemy when you're sitting in the room with them for two years and you really understand them. If you rely upon somebody else's narrative, it is easy to hate somebody you haven't met or spent time with. And by having this group working together, they no longer relied on the external narratives of who the other was. They crafted their own narrative. And through that process, the healing began, and then, the cultural changes began that have led to the improvements. I believe that that is something that can occur universally. It is replicable and scalable if people quit relying on other people's narratives, and you go when you understand the facts for yourself.
Yehuda Sharim: I will add two things. I think, first, we don't listen to ourselves. We carry the words within us. It's not only our society. Most of us are incapable of listening to what's going on inside of us. So, to create a place of listening, start with one. And I will also think that Chris is central for us and the Ann Arbor Black Film Festival in creating a space because most filmmakers are not being listened to. Most filmmakers, I don't know if they have anything to say, most of us carry cameras endlessly into our TikToks and Instagrams and think that's it. We all want to be liked. But what Chris allows us, and so many like Chris, is a space of dialog. And he asks us, "Okay, how can we work together?" What are the communities should be invited to the film screenings? So, the film screening in itself is not separated from circulation and distribution. We can all do it ourselves. Michael is doing it. We all do that. But I think it's really fascinating to see this kind of dialog that we have with Chris and thus extending it to the communities in Ann Arbor. I found that inspiring. Most film festivals don't always engage in conversation with you. You come, you're being selected, you feel honored or whatever you feel with the laurels and the trophies. But right now, we are talking about more than trophies. Michael said it and said it beautifully. The greatest award is when people change their lives through the art making. And I think that cannot be replaced by anything, really.
Caroline MacGregor: A strong message indeed. And, Chris, just to wrap up, where can people view these films this weekend at the Third Ann Arbor Black Film Festival?
Chris Anderson: Certainly! So, our film festival runs June 5th, 6th, and 7th in Ann Arbor. We start on June 5th at the Ann Arbor District Library. We will be showing a film about organizing and also a few other short films. Then, on Saturday, we're going to be showing films at the State Theater, as well as Third Mind Books in downtown Ann Arbor. If you're interested in seeing Michael's film, "Nothing to See Here: Watts," you'll definitely want to join us at 2:20 at the State Theatre, where that will be played. But there's also going to be a lot of incredible films playing there as well. The film I mentioned that went to the Cannes Film Festival will be playing later that evening past 8:00. We also are showing on Sunday at the Ann Arbor District Library, finishing our show. That's June 7th. And if you want to see you, Yehuda's film "Where's My Cup?," both directors are going to be in Ann Arbor, so you do want to do that. After "Where's my Coffee Cup?" at the Ann Arbor District Library at 3:45, Yehuda will also have a multimedia event where he's making connections between carceral genocide, occupation, immigration. It's going to be a very cool sort of multimedia performance by him and then a discussion about like what we can do as a community after that. And that's going to at 5 PM at the library as well. And I think we're going to have a lot of really interesting people from the community that are really excited to meet Yehuda. And then, I hope Michael is there to join us too, because I think he'll have a lots of insights to share as well. Also, I would be amiss not to mention that, at the same time, we run with the Ann Arbor African American Festival. And they're going to have a lot of performance and vendors in downtown Ann Arbor. So, you don't have to stay all day watching films. You can go and visit that festival location, hang out, and get some food and listen to Chico de Parche, who will be performing.
Michael Soenen: It may or may not be worth adding, but we have an art exhibit that travels with the show. It's what we call "Our Silent March." Lawanda Hawkins, whose son had been murdered by a gang in Watts, she then chose to serve other families who've lost children to violence, and at the end, she asks them for a pair of shoes from their child. And so, she's aggregated. She's helped, sadly, more than 200 families, and all 200 pairs of shoes are brought, and they sit on display outside the theater. And you understand the exhibit through the film, but that art exhibit will be brought to Ann Arbor for the festival.
Chris Anderson: I would be missed not to mention also, please visit A2BFF.org. That's A, the number 2, BFF.ORG slash events to learn more about our upcoming events.
Caroline MacGregor: Thank you so much to all of you! It's been wonderful to have this opportunity to speak with you! Thank you for joining us here!
Yehuda Sharim: Thank you so much!
Chris Anderson: Thank you!
Michael Soenen: Thanks for the interest, and thanks for coming and watching! It's going to be great!
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