Kahlil Pedizisai

Kevin Jerome Everson and his collaborator Kahlil I. Pedizisai filmed the comings and goings in front of a trap house on Empire Street in Cleveland, Ohio. Loosely inspired by Andy Warhol's 1964 film "Empire," which also runs for eight hours.

This immersive eight-hour documentary follows workers in a Virginia factory over the course of an entire day, from clock-in to clock-out. Long, unbroken sequences of assembly and fabrication focus on the bodies of African American and Vietnamese American workers, while both mobile and fixed cameras transform their acts into pure movement. Everson’s “shift-film” adjusts the frame on race, class, and labor, celebrating the everyday and imbuing working bodies with new dimensions.

This short is based on Chester Himes’s novel Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and its adaptation for the screen by Ossie Davis in 1970. The cotton in the novel and film comes from the region around Columbus, Mississippi. Shot in noir-style, the film focuses on the scene when detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones interrogate Lo-Boy, an artist/hustler, about the event around the demise of his friend Early Riser.

Centred on a scene from Tennessee Williams’s play Kingdom of Earth (1968). Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus. Filmed as if it were a stage play, the title character, Chicken of Kingdom, struggles with how people view him.