Crime or Violence

Each year, more women undergo treatment at hospital emergency surgical services as a result of family violence than rapes, muggings, and car wrecks combined. This startling statistic is the basis for a series of site-specific installations on domestic violence, On The Edge Of Time. Underground, the first installation for the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Art Festival, used three wrecked cars strewn along a 180-foot section of railroad track to reference the history of Abolition and the Underground Railroad, and as metaphors for different aspects of abuse.

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories."

A man learns his daughter has been brutally murdered by her husband. Time stands still as he oscillates between the need for solace and his urge for revenge. La Bouche is an experimental musical featuring Guinean percussion master Mohamed Bangoura (“Red Devil”), loosely based on his own story.

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.

Loosely based on the 1950s British detective film Sapphire, in which two Scotland Yard detectives investigate the murder of a young woman who is passing for white, Sapphire and the Slave Girl examines the determinants of Sapphire's murder investigation through its cinematic representation.

Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.

Playing Dead is a film about lying still to stay alive. A news reporter queries the survivor of a brutal attack.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

An investigative documentary on police brutality that uses the Rodney King incident as a springboard to analyze the inner workings of the LAPD under the leadership of former police chief, Daryl Gates. Containing hard-hitting footage of police violence, the tape also depicts communities working against the daily occupation of their neighborhoods. Through interviews with LAPD officers and supervisors, the tape reveals what life is like behind the “thin blue line” and documents a national crisis of violence.

Black Code / Code Noir unites temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the murder of Michael Brown and that of Kajieme Powell by American police officers in 2014. Archaeologically, the film argues that behind this current situation is a sedimented history of slavery, preserved by the Black Code laws of the colonies in the early Americas. These codes have transformed into the algorithms that configure police Big Data and the necropolitical control of African-Americans today. Yet how can we read this in the present?

An intimate dialogue with Soha Bechara, ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter, in her Paris dorm room. The interview was taped during the last year of the Israeli occupation, one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation center (South Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years—six in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival, and will, the overexposed image of the survivor speaks quietly and directly to the camera—not speaking of the torture, but of separation amd loss; of what is left behind and what remains.