SATURDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30pm
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.
— George Jackson, “Blood in My Eye,” 1972
Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley,” The Funambulist, 2018
Revolutionary organizations must mirror the organization of the future.
—George Jackson Brigade, “The Power of the People Is the Source of Life: Political Statement of the George Jackson Brigade,” 1977
In 1975, just four years after George Jackson’s murder by San Quentin prison guards, an underground group of militant “urban guerillas”—working class, multi-racial, queer, and armed—gathered in Seattle, WA with a shared conviction, red-hot and fueled by Jackson’s proto-abolitionist spirit. They wanted to bring down US imperialism, destroy its growing prison system and the interlocking forces of domination that buoy it.
Over the course of the next two years, the George Jackson Brigade executed a series of bombings and bank expropriations, targeting government buildings and echelons of capital across the Pacific Northwest. On International Women’s Day 1976, they issued a communiqué to self-critique and draw lessons from their most recent action: an attempted robbery of the Pacific National Bank of Washington, which left two of their members injured and incarcerated, and one killed by police.
For the George Jackson Brigade, death and capture invoked both grief and renewed life; they closed their statement as follows:
We are cozy cuddly, armed and dangerous, and we will raze the fucking prisons to the ground!
Love and Struggle, GJB
”XO & Struggle” draws inspiration from George Jackson and the George Jackson Brigade’s embrace of both love and struggle in the slow-burn of revolutionary progress. The filmmakers in this program push and probe these political commitments in form (interviews, verité, animation, and sonic experiments), in content (movement elders, remixed archival footage, and prison uprisings real and imagined), and in practice (collaboration, organizing, making/circulating art). United is their shared belief that art alone cannot transform the conditions that produce carceral violence. The Brigade’s rallying cry—cozy, cuddly, armed and dangerous—resonates in sharp and dulcet tones across these artistic engagements with our abolitionist horizon.
After a first installment at Maysles Documentary Center in December 2022, “XO & Struggle” returns in joyous, critical reflection of the Brigade’s legacy and of the role of filmmaking in the ongoing fight against police and prisons. However, “XO & Struggle II” is neither lament nor call for demolition. It’s a call to action, to creation—for presence, experimentation, abundance, care, and building anew. It’s the invocation of a political project at times mournful and destructive, and yet endlessly invigorated by the preciousness and creativity of human life.
Featuring work by: Saeedah Cook, Kelly Gallagher, Cameron A. Granger, Christopher Harris, Alex Johnston, and Matazi Weathers.
Post-screening conversation with Christopher Harris, Alex Johnston, Saeedah Cook, and Cameron A. Granger, moderated by Emily Rose Apter.
PROGRAM
COZY CUDDLY, ARMED AND DANGEROUS: A FILM WITH THE GEORGE JACKSON BRIGADE
Dir. Alex Johnston, 2025.
United States. Work-in-Progress Excerpts
An intimate present-day group portrait of three surviving George Jackson Brigade members, the film takes its name from the concluding lines of a 1976 GJB communique, released on International Women’s Day: “We are cozy cuddly, armed and dangerous, and we will raze the fucking prisons to the ground!”
DREAMS UNDER CONFINEMENT
Dir. Christopher Harris, 2021.
United States. 3 min.
Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape
SPEAKING IN TONGUES: TAKE ONE
Dir. Christopher Harris, 2024.
United States. 15 min.
A film about Black ecstasy and the carceral forces arrayed against it.
THE LINE
Dir. Cameron A. Granger, 2021.
United States. 7 min.
Using the history of Columbus’ near east side and its people as an anchor, The Line is a film about Black migrations, urban development, and most of all, love. Featuring the voices of: Ms. Aminah Robinson, Ms. Julialynne Walker, and Mr. William Richardson, with additional audio from WOSU’s documentary on Columbus’ Neighborhoods.
JUST BELOW HEAVEN
Dir. Cameron A. Granger, 2025
United States. 9 min.
Using behavioral theorist BF Skinner’s series of studies on the rock dove, also known as the common pigeon, Just Below Heaven recasts Skinner’s theory of behavior and control as a stage where the cultural scripts and modes that fuel the machinery of American life are brought under scrutiny. A pigeon has a dream, and finds each one of us in it.
PEARL PISTOLS
Dir. Kelly Gallagher, 2014.
United States. 3 min.
A glitter-bomb resurrection of a speech by Queen Mother Moore.
DARKER
Dir. Matazi Weathers, 2024.
United States, 19 min.
In a dystopian Los Angeles, a coalition of Black insurgents, trans hackers, and their POC allies prepare for an uprising.
ABOLITION AFFIRMATIONS 1 & 2
Dir. Saeedah Cook, 2021.
United States, 2 min.
Abolition Affirmations is a really straight forward project, exactly what it sounds like a compilation of tiny video motivations. It is visual self talk. The reality is that film itself can’t do much to change people’s material conditions. People’s power is needed to change our material realities. The affirmation at best can power the people’s imagination to think about a world without prison, and also keep people ignited until the next fight.
TRT: 72 min.
Solidarity Media Network is a media initiative, dedicated to growing social wealth and supporting civic engagement through media production & distribution, research, education, and workforce development. We believe systems change at scale to undo the pernicious effects of mass incarceration on individuals and our society at large. This requires a rigorous commitment to shared resources, community engagement, and capacity building from the grass roots to the industrial. www.solidaritymedianetwork.org ig:@solidarity.media.network