Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to kick off our incredible three day workshop HOPEFUL REBELLION: SOBER OPTIMISM IN POLITICAL CINEMA with a special public screening, not to be missed!

We invite you to a special screening of An Injury to One by Travis Wilkerson and The Second Burial by Erin Wilkerson—two bold, formally inventive works that interrogate power, memory, and resistance through cinematic language. Travis and Erin Wilkerson together form Creative Agitation, a political art collective that seeks to unify the creative and political act in absolute equality. Above all else, they strive towards bold, concrete proposals, inspiring enactments of different models of human existence; a combustible sphere where art and action collide, and where the truly imaginative capacities of creativity can finally be put to meaningful use.

Travis Wilkerson, described by Sight & Sound as “the political conscience of American cinema,” draws from histories of radical filmmaking to create urgent portraits of struggle. An Injury to One revisits the murder of union organizer Frank Little in early 20th-century Montana, offering a searing critique of corporate violence and historical erasure. Erin Wilkerson’s The Second Burial meditates on ritual, colonial legacies, and speculative futures, building on her practice of deep listening and hybrid forms, from essay film to feral cinema.

This screening is an extension of The UNDO Fellowship’s ongoing collaboration with Travis Wilkerson and critic Victor Guimarães, who are investigating the unfinished legacies of global resistance cinemas—from the L.A. Rebellion to Third Cinema—and their relevance today. Come through and peek into their truly extraordinary research!

The screening will be followed by discussion with the filmmakers, as we look back to historical frameworks of resistance to understand their successes and learn from their abandoned efforts. Come through!

Program

The Second Burial

19 min, 2022

The Second Burial tells of the two marked graves of the pirate Christopher Columbus, and generations of indigenous peoples, with none. An essay for the children who never left the Residential Schools, told via the colonial plunder in Barcelona and the civil war that followed, alongside Wilkerson’s personal family heirlooms, brought from Europe to the former Mexican territory of California, one hundred years ago. Colonial violence against the other, also manifests against its own. And if left unchecked, it has the potential to destroy us all.

An Injury to One

53 min, 2003

An Injury to One provides a corrective—and absolutely compelling—glimpse of a particularly volatile moment in early 20th century American labor history: the rise and fall of Butte, Montana. Specifically, it chronicles the mysterious death of Wobbly organizer Frank Little, a story whose grisly details have taken on a legendary status in the state.

Program Duration: 72 mins

Bios

A chance meeting in Havana with the legendary Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson’s life. His internationally recognized body of filmmaking crosses boundaries with documentary and fiction, performance, and activism.

At the epicenter of his work is the ongoing search for meeting points of aesthetic eloquence and political engagement, produced with an absolute modesty of material resources, as self-sufficiently as possible. In 2015, Sight & Sound called Wilkerson “the political conscience of American cinema.” His films have screened at hundreds of festivals worldwide, including Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, and Locarno. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, UnDo Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Rockefeller Grant, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts.

The New Yorker called Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? one of the “Sixty-Two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.” An Injury to One was named one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by Film Comment and a “political-cinema landmark” by the LA Times. His latest work – Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing, a tribute to the Yugoslavian Black Wave, premiered in Encounters at the 74th Berlinale. Variety called it “dynamically entertaining… a beautifully monochromatic meditation on how nothing is actually black and white.”

American guerrilla gardener turned feral filmmaker, Erin Michele Wilkerson, is the co-founder of the political art collective, Creative Agitation along with her partner, Travis Wilkerson. They have exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Locarno Film Festival, the Viennale, and the Berlinale, and their film, Nuclear Family (2021) was awarded Mención Especial at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, and is distributed by Arsenal (Berlin). Grounded in ecology thanks to her early professional work in landscape architecture, her solo practice is rooted in the exploration of global narratives.

She works in feral filmmaking, based on the guerrilla tactics of Third Cinema and as resistance to the Hollywood model. A methodology she developed as part of her PhD work, “Invasive Species,” for Liverpool John Moores University. Her solo international exhibitions include, The Second Burial (2023), which premiered at DOKUFEST and streamed on MUBI. She has also exhibited at Prismatic Ground (New York), FICUNAM (Mexico), Arica Docs (Chile), and INTERSECCION (Spain). She is currently a Lecturer in film/art research and practice at Duke Kunshan University.