Like so many other artists whose work was put on indefinite hold when the pandemic hit in 2020, filmmaker Valerio Ciriaci had to shelve his documentary in progress, which he’d been toiling away at for years.
But in his case, that project was a film on Christopher Columbus, and in May of that year, as millions of people took to the streets for the Black Lives Matter protests, Ciriaci and his collaborators were jolted by the newfound relevance of their film, so they immediately returned to work.
“We decided to widen the scope of that film to include other symbols of American history that were targeted by the protests,” Ciriaci said.
The 70-minute film, a meditative and often eerie documentary called “Stonebreakers,” screens at the Brooklyn Film Festival on Saturday. It includes footage shot across the country, in New York City, Connecticut, Richmond, Virginia, Mount Rushmore and at the Mexican border in Arizona, where crowds of demonstrators went to battle over symbols and occasionally engage in standoffs with their conservative opponents.
“What we were witnessing was not really an erasure of history, as many critics were saying at the time, but rather an explosion of the past into the present,” Ciriaci told Gothamist in an interview.
At Columbus Circle in New York, where the 76-foot-tall statue of Columbus looms over a group of protesters in the film, one demonstrator holds up a sign reading “For America to Rise, Statues Must Fall,” while others exhort the crowd.
“That statue is saying, ‘It’s OK to murder people! To steal their land.’ That’s what he did,” said Roberto Múkaro Borrero, a kasike (chief) of the Guainía Taíno tribal community, holding a megaphone.
At times, the images are surreal, as when the viewer encounters a headless statue, or an artisan is seen cradling a granite head of Columbus in his arms while taking the long view of the protests.
“In art history,” Randall Nelson, a sculptor in Waterbury, Conn., says in the film,…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply