Deep in the Arkansas Delta lies the legacy of the worst racial or labor conflict in American history—buried for 100 years.
WE HAVE JUST BEGUN (dir. Michael Warren Wilson, USA, 2023)
March 1 screening will include:
– Live score by Joshua Asante
– Live narration by Tongo Eisen-Marten
– Introduction by director Michael Warren Wilson
– Post-screening discussion
During the Red Summer of 1919, dozens of race and labor riots erupted throughout every major city in the US—but in Elaine, a rural war on Black workers eclipsed them all. WE HAVE JUST BEGUN examines the legacy of the 1919 Elaine Massacre, a pivotal event in US history where hundreds of Black sharecroppers were murdered for collective organizing under colonial conditions. This live screening features narration by poet and activist Tongo Eisen-Martin, whose spoken word brings a resonant depth to the film’s exploration of erasure, justice, and memory. Musician and vocalist Joshua Asante provides a live score, blending soulful arrangements and atmospheric soundscapes to enhance the film’s spectral visuals. Both live narration and music create an immersive experience, deepening the film’s exploration of historical haunting and its connection to the present.
Co-Writer/Director/Producer
Michael Warren Wilson is a filmmaker and artist who was born in Arkansas, graduated from Little Rock Central High without learning about the Elaine Massacre. Although his great-grandfather was a sharecropper in the Arkansas Delta in 1919, no family stories of the event exist. Wilson’s films, collaborative projects, and multimedia art and initiatives have been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Entermultimediale, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. He has taught film, multimedia and art practice at Pitzer College, UC-Riverside, UC-Irvine, Otis College of Art, and San Francisco Film School.
Co-Writer/Co-Narrator/Producer
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. With roots in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Composer/Sound Recordist
Joshua Asante is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores themes of identity and possibility from an Afrofuturist perspective. As musician & composer, Asante describes his sound as “astral soul,” a blend of electronic and soul music that fuses many stylistic influences. Asante released two singles in 2021, a collection of eighteen field recorded songs in 2022, and his debut full length album in 2023. His photographs and designs have found homes in both private and museum collections as well arts & news outlets, including The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, The Guardian, ProPublica, Objectiv, MSNBC, Oxford American, and The Arkansas Times.
Part of the Spectres of Empire film series. The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild is pleased to collaborate with Union College Film Studies in presenting a series of films that speak to colonialism, exploitation and erasure of histories. Each screening will include special guests and a discussion.
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