How A Short Film Demonstrates an Abolitionist Imagination
A Letter from the AlumNest by Ash Goh Hua
Ash Goh Hua is the director of of Chicken & Egg Pictures-supported film I’m Free Now, You Are Free.
Chicken & Egg Pictures has supported 350+ women and gender nonconforming nonfiction directors from all around the world, and that number continues to grow each year. Letters from the AlumNest is a blog series from the perspective of some of our Nest-supported filmmakers.
My film I’m Free Now, You Are Free is a short documentary about the reunion and repair between Mike Africa Jr and his mother Debbie Sims — a formerly incarcerated political prisoner of the MOVE9. In 1978, Debbie, then 8 months pregnant, and many other family members were arrested after an attack by the Philadelphia Police Department; born in a prison cell, Mike Jr. spent just three days with his mother before guards wrenched him away, and they spent the next 40 years struggling for freedom and for each other. In 2018, Mike Jr. successfully organized to have his parents released on parole. “I realized that I had never seen her feet before,” was a remark he made when he reflected on Debbie’s homecoming.
“Statistics and empirical evidence don’t necessarily convince people of anything, which means that there is a whole dimension that we need to articulate, which is the cultural dimension. We need to have stories to tell [and] ways to retell a historical story, another way to narrate what is true and what is not true.” — Dylan Rodriguez, co-founder of Critical Resistance
Here Dylan Rodriguez speaks about how unconvincing statistics and empirical evidence are to people who are already unconvinced, and how a cultural dimension must be articulated within our political work. As a cultural worker and political organizer, my filmmaking aims to do exactly this. I understand ideology to be emotional, not factual; in order to reveal possibilities beyond what dominant ideology offers — which, under neoliberal capitalism, is carcerality, utter exploitation, coerced death — we must attempt to tell stories of life, relation, and humanity that demonstrate a different imagination.
I’m Free Now, You Are Free meditates on Black family preservation as resistance against the brutal legacies of state sanctioned family separation, documenting an intergenerational healing that possesses, defiantly, dignity and joy. Armed with a super 8 camera, they recreated family tapes that could’ve been, creating a portal into an alternate lifetime in which mother and son were never separated.
The film demonstrates an abolitionist imagination that demands that Black life deserves life, and deserves time. Embracing and enduring all complicated nuances of being in relationship, the film also demonstrates their loving revolutionary interdependency, driving home the point that people on the outside do time with people on the inside, and for communities and relationships to heal and flourish, repressive state apparatuses like prisons and policing must be abolished.
The cultural dimension of our struggle cannot be alienated from the political struggle. I made I’m Free Now, You Are Free with my political community, in order to tangibly support organizing efforts for the political prisoner liberation movement.
Now that all living MOVE9 members have been released from prison, we focus our efforts on freeing other political prisoners: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and too many others; our events grow the organizing capacity of audiences by connecting them to organizations like the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. Since the film’s release, we have and continue to organize numerous community screenings in partnership with abolitionist community groups, elevating the urgency of abolition beyond statistics and numbers into an emotional and essential humanity.
I’m Free Now, You are Free will broadcast on POV Shorts on PBS on Monday, November 29.
I’m Free Now, You Are Free is a film of Common Notions supported by the Jacob Burns Creative Culture Fellowship, Chicken & Egg Pictures, The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts, NeXt Doc’s FleX Fund & IF/Then Shorts | Field of Vision. It has screened, competed and won awards at renowned festivals like BlackStar Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAMcinemafest, Third Horizon Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. The film is distributed through PBS’s POV Shorts and Third World Newsreel.
Ash Goh Hua (any pronouns) is a filmmaker and cultural worker from Singapore, based in New York. They create documentary and experimental based work informed by the politics of abolition and autonomy. Often incorporating archives and anachronistic formats, Ash’s films show different imaginations to demonstrate the possibilities of liberated futures. They have been supported by programs and fellowships by Sundance, NYFA, Jacob Burns Film Center, Jerome Foundation, and more.
