Creative Agitation

The first of two two Videographic essays with critical reflections on representations of the Vietnam War. “Full Metal Kuleshov Effect,” counterposes the work of Stanley Kubrick with that of Santiago Alvarez and the Vietnamese director Hai Ninh.​

If there is anyone who embodies the current state of life in Croatia, it is the police detective Ivan Peric. The son of a fisherman, he became a detective as a way of avoiding working in the only really prospering industry of present-day Croatia – tourism. Now his life is consumed by trying to solve a series of essentially unsolvable murders of tourists. Because the tourists are so widely despised, no one will help Ivan. Evidence disappears into the labyrinth of bureaucracy. He is humiliated in public and online. In the local press, his boss even labels him an “uhljeb”, the Croatian slur for a “lazy bureaucratic parasite”. All of this takes place in the city of Split, where the breakup of Yugoslavia has left its mark.

A family trip across the American West becomes an essay film about nuclear threats past and present. The apocalypse is omnipresent, and the journey shows that destruction has long since become inscribed into the landscape and history of the country.

"...In the film, Wilkerson presents four interviewees. Two are widows whose family members (one husband, one son) were Afghan vets who committed suicide. The other two are women who lost family members because Detroit Edison turned off their electricity during the winter. Wilkerson does nothing to draw parallels between these two forms of injustice. Rather, by simply juxtaposing the women’s stories, we are able to see how systematic indifference to human life takes multiple forms, but comes back to the same root causes, and how we are indeed fighting the same war against the poor and disenfranchised at home and abroad – ici et ailleurs. – Michael Sicinski, Mubi Notebook.

A reply to an earlier work – a radically digressive footnote – and the opening salvo of a new tendency. It is intensely personal and explores the relationship of storytelling to violence, to power, and to memory.

A monument to the Tlatelolco student massacre of 1968 in Mexico City, ten days before the Olympics. Hundred of students were disappeared. A grotesque tradition - the complete physical obliteration of students organizing for progressive change - was hurled into motion. This film is nearly wordless. In place of words, the enactment of violence against the images themselves, in a stagger towards commensurate aesthetics.

The film explores the archive to tell the story of how Burnam Burnam, in 1988, reclaimed the White Cliffs of Dover for the Wurundjeri people. Along with a promise not to repeat the violence suffered by him and his ancestors.

The Second Burial tells of the two marked graves of the pirate Christopher Columbus, and generations of indigenous peoples, with none. An essay for the children who never left the Residential Schools, told via the colonial plunder in Barcelona and the civil war that followed, alongside Wilkerson's personal family heirlooms, brought from Europe to the former Mexican territory of California, one hundred years ago. Colonial violence against the other, also manifests against its own. And if left unchecked, it has the potential to destroy us all.

A haunted man desperately searches for his lost love through an illegal pirate radio broadcast. Punk-agit-noir.

A documentary about Erin Wilkerson's family history in Los Angeles. It seeks to honor the indigenous people who have been treated as migrants in their own land since Spanish colonization. With their generosity, friendship, and hard work, they are the backbone of the city. Seeing them persecuted in the streets and living so far away feels like a failure.