Kopkind Colony

James Garcia

If there’s a through line to the first months of Trump 2.0 it’s the president’s penchant for trying to disappear his critics, enemies and the fast-multiplying targets of his disdain.

It’s classic authoritarian behavior.

Donald Trump is a dictator at heart, and like all “good” dictators, he relishes the idea that he can banish anyone he thinks could get in his way.

Don’t like brown immigrants? Snatch them off the streets, deport them and do all you can to keep them from coming here in the first place.

Don’t like a free press? Claim, without evidence, that it’s fake, do all you can to muzzle it, and prop up pliant members of the news media — like Fox, Newsmax and One America.

Don’t like the fact that women and minorities have had greater access to job opportunities in recent decades? Attack labor and civil rights laws under the guise that you’re dismantling DEI programs.

Don’t like that historically disenfranchised communities are allowed to vote? Suppress, or block outright, their access to the polls — and if they win elections anyway, falsely claim they cheated and the system can’t be trusted.

Don’t like people with disabilities, Muslims, veterans, the poor, environmentalists, public schools and universities, foreign aid, people of color, park rangers, student loans, scientists, academics, asylum seekers, Social Security and Medicaid, unions, the LGBTQ+ community (especially trans people), public broadcasting, artists, people with AIDS, people with COVID, fluoride, accurate historical accounts, kids who get the measles, or the president and people of Ukraine? (And, no, this is not an exhaustive list.) Do all you can to cripple or shut down federal agencies and illegally slash  congressionally mandated funding that supports these groups and programs.

Why? Because that’s what dictators do. That’s what oligarchs do. That’s what fascists do.

Trump’s goal is as simple as it is dangerous: to erase anyone and anything he considers a threat to his quickly expanding stranglehold on power. But if the reaction to his agenda by a growing and diverse contingent of Americans in the past few weeks is any indication, including by people who voted for him in November, Trump will not erase us.

On April 5, millions of people across 50 states and around the world took to the streets to roundly and courageously condemn the chaos, cruelty and corruption of Trumpism in action. As the Arizona Mirror reported, it was all part of a national day of protest called Hands Off “that saw more than 1,300 events across the country — many in heavily GOP areas that backed Trump by a large margin in the last election.”

“In many locations,” reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy wrote, “crowds dwarfed expectations: A march in Washington, DC, saw five times more than the 10,000 that were anticipated, while the New York City protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks and overwhelmed city streets.”

At the protest in Sedona, one of roughly 30 in the Grand Canyon State, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told a crowd of nearly 1,000: “We are fighting back with what I call the three Cs: courage, crowds, and the courts.” Mayes has been partnering with other Democratic attorneys general across the country to file a slew of lawsuits challenging Trump’s most egregious executive measures.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told the more than 2,000 people gathered at the Capitol in Phoenix that they embodied the true meaning of the First Amendment: the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. “Those grievances are growing larger and larger,” Fontes declared.

Alicia Van Driel, part of a “Hands Off” march in Salem, Oregon, said, “I knew Trump was dishonest before he got voted in. I didn’t vote for him, and everybody that has voted for him needs to take a look at what’s really going on.”

Demonstrators in Connecticut, like Jim Chapdelaine, a volunteer with the grassroots group Indivisible, gathered in a cold rain outside the Capitol building in Hartford. “A little rain is not going to stop us from saving democracy,” Chapdelaine told the crowd of between 2,500 and 3,000.

Facing a flood of what judges and legal scholars have labeled as unconstitutional executive orders issued by the president since taking office, millions of us are rising up to defy his naked power grab.

Oblivious to the depth and breadth of the growing resistance movement, Trump is still expecting us all to cower at his feet, fearful that the thugs he’s been ordering to disappear his critics in the immigrant community will come for us next. Or worse, that he’ll call out the troops to silence dissent.

The trouble with dictators, however, is that they always overreach. Blinded by narcissism and enabled by spineless sycophants, autocrats eventually start to believe the self-fabricated myth of their own omnipotence.

In Trump’s case, it’s one thing to be the most powerful man on earth, but quite another to expect that a critical mass of this country’s 330 million citizens are willing to abet their own demise.

No, Donald, you will not erase us.

James Garcia is a journalist, playwright and community theater director in Phoenix. He was a Kopkind mentor in 2013. A longer form of this piece appeared as commentary in the Arizona Mirror on April 9.

April 5 was followed by another nationwide protest on April 19, which will be followed by numerous actions on Earth Day, April 22. The character of the protests differs from march to march, and from city to city. Where politicians show up in one place, they are absent in others; either way, these are not their protests. They are blows against people’s own fear. Movements grow from that first refusal to be silent. Many flags flew in Buffalo on April 5 — American (some in the international distress position), Palestinian, Rainbow, Canadian, others. Stopping the violence program at home and abroad was a critical element of the organizing there. Fury at the bipartisan commitment to erasing Gaza and the Palestinians was graphically expressed in the sign of the Buffalo protester below (apologies for the shaky photograph).

Part of any great movie experience is the chance to talk about it after with others. We do that at Kopkind all the time, following our public screenings, at our filmmakers’ workshop/retreat with the Center for Documentary Film, and throughout the summer project in seminar or dinner conversation, in the ideas writers, activists, filmmakers, share. About a month ago film camp alum Annie Berman forwarded a striking piece of writing by our new friend Maliyamungu Muhande, a Congolese artist and filmmaker in New York. Maliya-mungu wrote it, yes, in response to Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a riveting documentary up for an Oscar on Sunday, but mainly because, at that moment, Congo was (and is) bleeding, most dramatically at the hands of Rwanda-backed killers, but not just them. Maliyamungu calls this piece an outcry. We shared it with The Nation, which published it on February 14, and share it with you now. There are links at the end for information and action.

by Maliyamungu Muhande

Do you hear that silence?

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a phenomenal film—brilliantly crafted.  

Johan Grimonprez unearths truths about the overthrow of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, that history tried to sever, layering them like an intricate composition where every note matters.  

It is also a warning.  

A warning that is being met with applause instead of action.  

Audiences marvel at the editing, the nonlinear structure, the radical way jazz intertwines with the story of a crime.  

They are impressed, engaged, intellectually stimulated.  

And then—  

they move on.  

The film exists, but the silence remains.  

I do not expect you to fathom the pain of the Congolese people today.  

I do not expect you to stretch your imagination to grasp the inhumane exploitation of land, the abuse of innocent children, children who only wish to rest on their mothers’ bosoms but instead witness them raped, crying, or taking their last breath as gunfire interrupts their small, running feet.  

I do not expect you to feel it.  

But I do expect you to hear it.  

Even as you make me feel crazy for expecting you to hear it.  

The sound of UN guards laughing as they dismiss a small but mighty group of Congolese protesters.  

The sound of busy footsteps on First Avenue, people too preoccupied with their routines to pause.  

The sound of a Congolese mother calling a phone that will never ring is making my ears bleed.

The sound of a city cut off from the world, suffocated at the throat, is irregulating my breath.

As if my people’s deaths aren’t the reason you were able to connect with loved ones by Zoom during the pandemic.  

As if our mothers’ rape isn’t the reason you can hear your son, studying abroad, answer your call.  

As if you don’t owe it to us to consider that we, too, want to live and communicate.

But in peace, not at the price of our children.  

And yet, silence.

Not just in Congo, where bombs fall without warning and leave behind echoes of mourning.  

Not just in Bukavu, where rape crushes dignity and joy, this weapon that stings deeper than a fatal degree burn, that shatters entire families in ways no statistics can measure.  

Not just in the villages, where children dig for cobalt with hands too small to even hold their mothers’ thumbs.  

But here, in New York City.  

Where we marched for George Floyd’s breath.  

Where we spoke justice to power through Zoom organizing meetings.

Where we circulated evidence of injustice and said her name: Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor.  

How is it that our comfort remains uninterrupted even as a genocide unfolds for the sake of the very phones we use to demand justice?  

Break this loud silence!

It is a silence louder than any siren.  

It is a silence that drowns and that kills.  

Filmmaker Grimonprez himself said: 

Le revers de la médaille c’est que pendant que les Belges regardent du jazz à la télévision, un génocide est en train de se produire au Congo oriental.

“The flip side of the coin is that while the Belgians were watching jazz on television, a genocide was taking place in Eastern Congo.”

What has changed?  

Today, you watch a film that maps the violence, that stitches together sound and silence, that tells you what has been done and what is still being done.  

Then you go home, and the war continues.  

People analyze the film’s historical layers, debate its themes, but they are not worrying about the Congolese people still dying.  

I do not need you simply to understand the film.  

I need you to engage with what it demands of you.  

Not just to be awed by its craft but to recognize that it is not just a film.

And who am I? Why should you care? I am a Congolese artist and filmmaker terrified by the idea that what we create is just for vibes. We, the Congolese people, need you to say our names, say that we too matter, if not because you believe it then because without us and the existence of our home, our minerals, our labor, you wouldn’t have most of what you think is more important than us.

Here is a document of a war that never ended.  

Here is a call to action, not a closing statement.  

You cannot treat it as an intellectual exercise while remaining silent in the face of the very horrors it exposes.  

To do so is to play into the very system it critiques.  

To do so is to watch history unfold and decide to let it repeat.  

Maybe 1885—King Leopold’s curse, backed by the Western world’s infamous Congo Club—feels too far removed for you. 

Maybe 1961—Patrice Lumumba’s last day, engineered by the same Club one year after we dared to claim independence—feels too far removed.

So let’s focus on last week.  

At least 3,000 dead.

One of them was my cousin.  

He was home when the bomb fell.  

My mother spoke to him on Sunday, January 26.  

Then silence.  

For two days, she called his phone, hoping, praying it was just the internet shutdown.  

That it was nothing more than a power outage.  

That the rebels had only cut the networks.  

That he was safe.  

But he wasn’t.  

A call came.  

And the silence was no longer just a silence.  

It was the end of his life on earth confirmed. 

A city cut off from the world.  

Goma thrown into digital darkness.  

No news could leave.  

No messages could arrive.  

While my cousin was dying, while hundreds of others were being slaughtered, the Congolese people were held hostage inside their own grief unable to call for help. 

Unable to say goodbye.  

Unable to tell their own stories.  

And the world moves on.  

Unworried.  

Uninterrupted.  

Not because the killings have stopped.  

Not because the war is over.  

But because the silence is effective.  

Because silence echoes, far and wide.  

What does silence do?  

It makes you believe nothing is happening.  

It makes you believe that history is history.  

That colonialism is past tense.  

That six million bodies, and just since 1998, are not stacked beneath the global economy.  

But history is not past.

Imperialism has not ended.  

It has only evolved.  

Found new words, new weapons, new justifications.  

My people have died for rubber, for gold, for diamonds, for uranium.  

Now we are dying for cobalt, for lithium.

For the devices you cannot live without.  

I am not even asking you to get loud.  

I am asking you to turn up the volume.

Because right now—

right now, the radio is off.  

Right now, the world is enabling thousands of deaths for profit.  

And I do not need everyone to march.  

I do not need everyone to scream.  

But I do need something.  

I will take a whisper over nothing.  

Because right now, I hear the outcry of Congolese people, but from everyone else—  

not even whispering.  

Africa, United States of Africa, please whisper.  

Please say something. Spirit of Lumumba, please come awaken the zeal of unity in us.

Western allies, please say something to your leaders.  

I will take one hour of your time.

I do not need a world full of people shouting.  

But I do need a world where people are at least speaking.

Where people are doing.  

If you have breath in your lungs,  

if you have power in your voice,  

then use it.  

Not just in admiration of a film.  

Not just in academic debate.  

Not just in passive acknowledgment of history.  

Because silence is not passive.  

Silence is not neutral.  

Silence is a weapon.  

And if you continue to wield it—

then you are choosing the side of those who kill us.  

Maliyamungu Muhande is a Congolese artist and filmmaker based in New York. For ongoing reports and analysis on Congo, she recommends the work of Kambale Musavuli; for action updates and information, Friends of the Congo; for grassroots support, Focus Congo.

On the shortest day, and the longest night, in a period of transition as the cosmic clock turns, we wish you all some beauty, hope and reflection, even amidst what can seem, what often is, a forbidding landscape. The American artist Charles Burchfield, who spent most of his life working in Western New York, was a remarkable observer, an exuberant lover of the small changes, secrets and outright wonders of the natural world. He also wrote short verses, kept journals and otherwise recorded things seen and felt. In one entry from the start of 1915 which he titled ‘Winter Solstice’, he wrote, “I can nearly always, if I can a field, find some dandelions in December. Once I found them on New Years Day. I think of December as a leafless landscape, white sunlight, misty distances, & dandelions hugging the lichen-like turf.” In his paintings and watercolors of spring and early summer these once-sleepy dandelions arise in splendrous poofs, ready to float and spread fresh seeds, new life. (Oh so much more desirable in his pictures, and in imagination, than in one’s garden!)

This winter, this season, in 2025, may we all imagine possibilities worthy of nature, and find a way to be the face of love and hope in the world.

Kopkind’s annual newsletter, ‘Sniffing the Zeitgeist’, is on its way, soon to arrive in the physical mailboxes of many of you. It recounts some scenes from our summer sessions, quotes some thoughts for the future from a number of Kopkind alums — ‘campers’ and guests — as well as from some liberationist heroes in the never-finished work of making a better world.

At the close of this year and the beginning of another, here’s one fitting for the season and all time, from James Baldwin: ‘I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist.’ May we choose this kind of optimism and act on it going forward.

From all at Kopkind, may you find joy in this holiday season! We thank you for your support and friendship, and welcome contributions. Kopkind is a 501(c)(3) educational and cultural project; all contributions are tax-exempt to the full extent allowable by law. The newsletter is accompanied by a return envelope for anyone who may wish to make a year-end donation by check. For online gifts, press the Donate button at the top of this site.

A red sun at night, meteorologists say, signals high pressure and pleasant days ahead. ‘Red sky at night a sailor’s delight’ and all that. That red sun from the vista where Kopkind convenes signifies pressure, for sure; as for pleasant weather, sociopolitically speaking, that’s something that people have always had to imagine and strive to realize.

Kopkind’s summer project turned 25 this year. Twenty-five years of bringing together left journalists, activists and filmmakers, and providing a space for people to ‘dream, dream big’, as one of our participants once said; to analyze the contemporary situation, learn together, think together, imagine paths forward and strategies to get there. And, along the way, to breathe, to recharge. To take pleasure in the good that life, nature, art and camaraderie have to offer. To remember history, its numberless named and unnamed people who have always had to fight, who faced times far harder than ours and sought to make a world fit to live in.

At Kopkind we’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to this project over the years with their time, their ideas, their donations, their words and images, knowledge and experience, their force of personality and generosity of spirit, their physical labor, their challenging questions, their social memory, their ability to create moments of profound collective insight and joy. We all will need such gifts — and spaces to share them and more — going forward. It’s not going to be an easy time. It never has been easy. And the pressures aren’t just national and global; they’re on us individually and organizationally.

So here comes the money part. Whether Giving Tuesday or Giving Anyday, this project needs you. Please help Kopkind continue to help the organizers, the writers, the mediamakers and sensemakers, the researchers, the artists, the thinkers and doers, defenders and troublemakers, workers all, as we strive with others for that better day. Thank you, with urgency and commitment.

In this, Kopkind’s 25th year, whether you can give $25 or $250 or $2500 or anything in between, please hit the Donate button in the top bar here; or, if you wish to write a check, please make it payable to Kopkind and send c/o JoAnn Wypijewski, 356 East 13th Street #11, New York, NY 10003. All gifts to Kopkind are tax deductible to the full exent allowable by law.

We leave you here with one more picture because, when words aren’t fully adequate, nature reminds us that even as night bears down, there will be light.

We first met filmmaker Ann Bennett in the summer of 2009. She had a formidable body of work by then, having been involved in the making of Citizen King, the Emmy-winning Hymn for Alvin Ailey, the mini-series Africans in America and America’s War on Poverty, all for PBS. She came to film camp, Kopkind’s partnership with the Center for Independent Documentary, with a project she was co-producing about photography in Afro-American life. In a sunny morning seminar she laid out her own mind-picture of moments preserved in numerous private snapshots and professional photographs, all of them accumulated in a documentary album, telling a story of a people whose histories were often undocumented and unparticularized when they weren’t caricatured. As she spoke, it was as if the images were spread out on the table before us, the memorialized individual instances of black people seen through black eyes, revealing something about collective experience that had been long obscured.

Ann was born on March 16, 1963, in Baltimore. She died at 61, on November 15, 2024, in New York. An obituary page photo gallery of her public life evokes that summer memory: pictures of her with collaborators and friends, of her alone (as in the uncredited image above, which sure looks to be set during the golden hour at Tree Frog Farm), the array reflecting the qualities that people who loved and admired her would try to put into words. Ann was wise, generous, a mentor to younger filmmakers and women in tech, a person who thrived in collaboration with others, a woman who was dedicated, who sparked one to think afresh, whose smile was pure sunshine, who exuded joyfulness, even when in considerable pain.

The next time Ann came to film camp, in 2018, her health problems were evident; her passion and radiance, undimmed. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, directed by Thomas Allen Harris, had come out in 2014 to much acclaim. A community engagement project, which we had been invited to imagine with her in that long-ago summer, had taken off in multimedia roadshows called Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, with audiences exploring the role of photography in the contest between “self-affirmation and negation,” and celebrating a common humanity. She came to the film workshop again the next year, 2019, bringing a work in progress she was co-producing about the battle between public housing residents in Miami’s Liberty City and a combine of government officials and real estate interests determined to drive them from their home. She brought the film’s director, Katja Esson, who had to leave suddenly one day, upon learning that bulldozers were moving again on the storied black inland neighborhood — high ground, now called a potential “goldmine” by speculators foreseeing the fate of beachfront as the oceans rise.

Razing Liberty Square aired as part of the PBS Independent Lens series this past January. The public housing project, which readers might recall as a key location in Barry Jenkins’ great film Moonlight, is gone. The developers, who had assured residents of their right of return to bright new buildings, broke their promises. They also tried to stop the documentary from being aired. The film is the record of an assault on a community, and a vehicle for ongoing popular resistance. It has a continuing life in discussions on confronting climate gentrification; in organizing against further displacement, and understanding, across the country, the mesh of climate, race, class and housing justice; in agitation by those who’ve been disbursed and those still living in Liberty City to restitch their community. “Please don’t give up,” Samantha Kenley, one of documentary’s main characters, said at a public meeting in March. “Please do what y’all need to do because if we shut up, nothing is going to happen.”

Ann’s work succeeds her.

Desireena Almoradie, who was part of the film camp cohort in 2018 and who conveyed the sad news of Ann’s death, writes, “I first met her at Kopkind, and our connection grew to a deep friendship that included her consulting on my film, and me bringing breakfast to her every morning when she was in physical therapy rehab a few blocks from my home. Ann was generous, kind, and always happy to share her knowledge, her information about filmmaker opportunities, and her deep well of loving kindness. She urged us to do our thing and make a difference.”

Yesterday, in wishing John Scagliotti a happy birthday, we noted the many encounters with history that his filmmaking has provided. Here is one with Audre Lorde from After Stonewall: From the Riots to the Millennium. It offers words especially pertinent in this time. Put them in your backpack for the road ahead!

November 14:  Things already bad are about to get worse. The government-in-waiting is swiftly taking shape as a den of punishers, fraudsters, mercenary-symps, crypto freaks, opportunists and fascists-by-whatever-name. As a first order of business, the future ‘border czar’ declared, undocumented immigrants have every reason to be afraid. So do protesters, leftists, ‘vermin’, we have been told repeatedly. Fear is the point. We need clarity now, and courage. ‘Are we going to be okay?’ a liberal interviewer asked writer and Kopkinder Jeff Sharlet the other day. ’No’, Jeff said. ’Some people will not make it. There will be losses.’

November 14:  The ‘we’ is the question. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, the International Workers of the World affirmed. ‘Don’t mourn; organize’, Joe Hill said before he died. History has been one bloody thing after another, and the old lines still serve as practical, not romantic, guides. ‘In politics, no matter how bad the situation, there is always something to do’, the writer and veteran of decades of struggles Frank Bardacke, also a Kopkinder, remarked the other day. ‘You just have to find the other people to do it with.’  We have heard from our alums who are talking with others about mutual aid, survival projects, defense projects. It’s early days. We have had conversations with some of our people who say, Yes, but I still see that long game, building the left, building for a future, for humanity. 

November 14:  John Scagliotti, Kopkind’s co-founder, administrator and animating spirit, was born on this day 76 years ago. Humanity got a gift that day. A gay man, an anti-imperialist, a human liberationist and independent media pioneer, John is attentive to history. ‘We’ve always had to fight’, he says. He’s right. His life and work evince that. The same is true for Kopkind, which across 25 years has encouraged, connected, sparked hundreds of people in struggle, people with long memories or fresh hopes that another world is possible. 

So today we say Happy birthday, John. We salute you, with love and gratitude. We remember those whose trials and resistance you preserved for us on film.

And salutations to everyone who’s working to find a way. To anyone who’s able, we will gratefully accept a contribution to Kopkind in honor of John, his work and inspiration, and all the work we have to do together going forward. (Click the Donate button on the banner at the top.)

Film camp, a seminar/retreat collaboration between Kopkind and the Center for Independent Documentary (CID), begins on August 4, gathering documentary filmmakers from around the country to workshop their films-in-progress and refresh themselves for the work ahead.

Capping this year’s session, we are proud to present a wonderful new documentary, “The Blues Society”, by Augusta Palmer, on Saturday, August 10, at 7:30 pm, at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford. This is a free public event.

Augusta, who will be on hand for the screening and discussion after, was at film camp a couple of years ago, workshopping this film, which tells the origin story of the first Memphis Country Blues Festival. It was 1969. In Memphis, a city with one of the richest musical histories of anyplace in the world, blues masters and beatniks created a festival that rocked the foundations of conservative America. Segregation may have been out by law but not in fact, and the violence that enforced it has never been legislateable. “The Blues Society” weaves hypnotic musical performances with animation, archival images and a chorus of voices to create a moving image mixtape that both celebrates the music and its makers and documents an era.

“There is always a disconnect in the deep context of the music, which is violence and pain and hurt”, one of Augusta’s interviewees says in the film. And still there is the sound, the musicians, the genius and their glorious legacy.

Please join us on August 10 for what promises to be a terrific evening.