Black Mothers Love & Resist
Description
Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, mothers of young Black men victimized by police brutality, come together and build a network of community-led support, mutual aid, and healing in Débora Souza Silva’s trenchant documentary spanning Oakland’s Fruitvale to the American South. Long before George Floyd’s murder and the BLM protests in 2020, Oscar Grant’s 2009 fateful encounter with law enforcement on a BART platform seeded public awareness and cultural consciousness of systemic racism and its discontents. Paying forward lessons learned and advocating against anti-Black violence in memory of her son, Oscar, Wanda Johnson holds space for Angela Williams, whose teen son, Ulysses, survives a police encounter in Troy, Alabama, living to tell his story. Radical empathy fuels this timely exposé.
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Trailer
Biographies
Débora Souza Silva is a documentary filmmaker whose work examines systemic racism and inequality. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, and on PBS, BBC, Reveal News, KQED, and Fusion. She is a recipient of the Les Payne Founder’s Award from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the NYT Institute Fellowship. She started her career as a TV reporter in Brazil before moving to California to pursue a Master’s in Journalism at UC Berkeley. In 2016, Silva was awarded a fellowship with the Center for Investigative Reporting; in 2018, she was a filmmaker in residence at SFFILM. For the four-part documentary series, The Aftermath, she won a Gracie Award. Black Mothers Love and Resist is her first feature.