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    Prescient Documentary on Race Relations Screens with Panel at the Wex

    On August 9, 2014, eighteen year old Michael Brown was gunned down by Ferguson, Missouri police. The shooting and subsequent riots shocked people from coast to coast, but to many in Cincinnati, this was simply a case of the same story, different day.

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    Wednesday night, September 2, the Wexner Center for the Arts will screen the film Cincinnati Goddamn to spark a dialog concerning our nation’s current and not-so-current issues with racial profiling, police brutality, and systemic racism.

    April Martin and Paul Hill’s documentary exposes the similarities between Ferguson and events in Cincinnati beginning in 1995 and culminating in race riots following the suspicious, police-involved deaths of Roger Owensby in November, 2000 and Timothy Thomas in April, 2001.

    According to Hill, an award-winning filmmaker, editor, and sound mixer working with visiting filmmakers in his position with the Wexner Center for the Arts, Cincinnati Goddamn is a work of love and longevity.

    “April Martin lived in Cincinnati while all these things were going on,” Hill says. “She decided to pick up the camera and document what was going on because she was unhappy with how the media was portraying everything that was going on.”

    In 2006, Martin came to the Wexner with a print of the film running about four hours in length.

    “She didn’t have a lot of storytelling skills at that point,” Hill says. “It was just a massive project.”

    Hill and Martin became friends and began working together on the footage.

    “We decided we would start shooting new interviews and new footage of the city,” he says. He took on such a substantive role in the creation of the new version that, by 2008, they’d decided to co-direct the film.

    “We just became good friends and I liked the project and I liked the passion April had about this project, so we decided to collaborate.”

    It was a long collaboration, but the final product offers an incisive look at the roots and ramifications of systemic racism. The filmmakers speak candidly with bereaved family members and witnesses, weave in crime scene footage and the news coverage of the day, and speak to historians, activists, police and political leaders to paint a picture that becomes jarringly prescient.

    “So, in 2006 we started this and just finished it now,” says Hill. “In a strange way, it feels like the movie was meant to come out now. If it had come out maybe two or three years ago, I don’t think the interest would be nearly as high.”

    Hill finds it a bit shocking how pertinent the film is today.

    “It didn’t seem this relevant all the years we were putting it together,” he says. “I was just wrapping up the film when Ferguson broke out. The exact same things were unfolding in the Ferguson story as what happened in the Cincinnati story. It just kind of validated what we’d been doing all these years, and it breathed new anger and injected a lot of frustration into the film that it didn’t have prior to the Ferguson incident.”

    In an interview filmed for the movie in 2008, historian Dr. Manny Marable says, “I think that Cincinnati 2001 uprising is a harbinger of the future. There will be more Cincinnatis over the next decade, I promise you that.”

    Says Hill, “Back in 2008 we didn’t have an ending for the film. And then Ferguson broke out and the film kind of ended itself.”

    The Wexner presents Cincinnati Goddamn free of charge on Wednesday night, September 2, at 7pm. A panel discussion will follow the screening with filmmakers April Martin and Paul Hill as well as Iris Roley, a political activist and participant in the documentary, and Rhonda Williams, founder and director of the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University.

    For more details, visit wexarts.org and www.cincinnatigoddamn.com.

    Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly horror movie podcast FRIGHT CLUB.

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    Hope Madden
    Hope Maddenhttps://columbusunderground.com
    Hope Madden is a freelance contributor on Columbus Underground who covers the independent film scene, writes film reviews and previews film events.
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