The Bay Area Protests (2016-2022) is a film about three periods of protest in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2009 to 2011: in 2009 the killing of Oscar Grant by a police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, also in 2009 the university student protests against the 35% tuition increase as a result of the California budget crisis, and in 2011 the Oakland Commune encampment during the Occupy movement, which was much more radical in its attitude regarding police, the state and its intention to challenge capitalism. The Bay Area Protests is filmed in two very different scenarios. One film location is the Marin County Courthouse, and the other location is the imagined space of the Kaiser Convention Center, a building that the Oakland Commune tried to occupy. The Bay Area Protests imagines they did occupy the building and the same Oakland Commune occupiers act out court scenes playing roles of judge, prosecuting lawyer, defense lawyer, and witness to recount major events of three protests: Oscar Grant’s killing and the protests that erupted are discussed, arrested university students are on trial and the courts dispute events during the Oakland Commune. This is all retold through the repressive court system. The Black Panthers sought to address the needs of Black communities ravaged by the societal impacts of structural racism and their social programs influenced the Oakland Commune’s vision to address the needs of people at the camp. All three protest movements, like those of the late 1960s, were responding to a deepening social crisis and these earlier and current social movements all faced horrifying state violence and repression. The Bay Area Protests was shot in 2016, but has only been completed when an ending to the film has become possible after waves of protests that shook the world in 2020 in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement was central to the protests which in the U.S. involved from 15 to 26 million people. Though Black Lives Matter started in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin by white vigilante George Zimmerman, Aliza Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, cites Oscar Grant’s murder as helping to start the movement. The George Floyd Rebellion culminates the narrative of The Bay Area Protests as it tells a story of many movements against the systemic racist and repressive violence of the capitalist state.

Home Together (2020-2022) is an episodic video series that focuses on communities of older people who decide to live collectively and look out for one another in their aging years. The film is a docu-fiction drama that looks at the situations of aging people finding ways to fight isolation in a society that marginalizes people who are older and it also looks at other related issues that impact older people. The story begins as we meet Janette Ledwith and learn about the community that she is creating. As the story follows her, we learn about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted older people as well as its other social impacts. We meet Seong-gee Um, a researcher in health equity who is studying how immigrant seniors receive home care and Catherine Doherty, who works in retirement living and long-term care. The fourth person introduced in the film is Theresa, an actor who deals with long-term illness, who brings a fictional element to the story by playing someone who wants to join a co-housing community for older people. Theresa’s character finds herself confronted with the exclusionary, ableist approach that some co-housing communities display when they avoid dealing with people’s health difficulties during older age. The film returns to Janette in 2022 who is in the process of selling the house where she intended to start the co-housing community and she reflects on the challenges of building a collective community of older people in the present moment.