Bernard Nicolas

Director Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (Nyesha) shows how awareness can lead to a more fulfilling life. In the film, a female typist goes from apathetic to empowered through the help of a man giving out political fliers on the street. Using John Coltrane’s song “After the Rain,” Ballenger’s narration of the film meditates on rainy days and their impact. The rain in this short film doesn’t signify defeat, but offers renewal and “a chance to recollect, a cool out.”

Emmy-winning documentary by a UCLA student concerning undocumented Mexican workers' struggle on a flower farm in Northern California. The documentary traces the worker's struggle at Año Nuevo flower farm, who were denied proper housing, denied pay, and extorted by the flower farm owner, and their attempt to bring a civil lawsuit against him. Footage includes interviews with dozens of Año Nuevo workers and main organizers, lawyers representing the group, local and state employees, and the owner of Año Nuevo farm. The documentary weaves in a history of Mexican immigration to the U.S., the struggles associated with crossing the border, the economic history of Mexico, and the crisis of transnational production in Mexico, displacing access to food staples. Following the bureaucratic state involvement with Año Nuevo Housing department and wage violations, workers organized from 1977-1979 to bring civil suit against their employer.

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

In 1902, a Gullah family on the Sea Islands off South Carolina decide whether to migrate to the mainland, risking their unique cultural heritage.

After being jailed by the Macoutes for complaining about worker exploitation at the baseball factory where he worked, a Haitian man and his family attempts to escape to the United States. On the boat, they are forced into the ocean at gunpoint far from the Florida coast, causing the man’s wife and his infant son to drown. The man is saved by an elderly couple, once illegal immigrants themselves. The couple helps the man to bury his son at sea and to gain entry to the United States.

Filmed in response to the LAPD’s shooting of Eulia Love in 1979, Gidget Meets Hondo opens with stills taken by Bernard Nicolas of a demonstration against Love’s killing. Nicolas’ Gidget is a self-absorbed young white woman who remains clueless to the violence erupting around her, ultimately to her own peril. The film asks whether such police brutality would be tolerated if the victim were a middle-class white woman.

Shopping Bag, Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space explores nine Los Angeles based artists reflecting on ritual in their life and art. Artist David Hammons discusses the role of chance and improvisation in his work while working on sculpture on a waste site while N’Senga Nengudi talks about staging her performances in freeway underpasses. Spanning performance to spoken word, environmental sculpture to music each artist talks about how ritual and cultural traditions informs their work. This experimental essay intercuts interviews, documentation and photographs with the music of Don Cherry seeking to adjust the criteria and language used to talk about artists of colour.