40° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARIES COMPETITION

RIOTSVILLE, USA

RIOTSVILLE, USA
by Sierra Pettengill
Country: USA
Year: 2022
Duration: 91'


Welcome to Riotsville, Usa, a turning point in American history where the protest movements of the late 1960s came into conflict with increasingly militarized police departments. Focusing on unearthed military training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” where military and police were trained to respond to civil disorder, director Sierra Pettengill reconstructs the formation of a national consciousness obsessed with maintaining law and order by any means necessary. Drawing insight from a time similar to our own, Riotsville, USA pulls focus on American institutional control; how it’s constructed and how it manages to rumble on.


Biography

film director

Sierra Pettengill

Is a Brooklyn based filmmaker. Her work focuses on the warped narratives of the American past. Most recently, she directed the archival short The Rifleman, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Her 2017 feature-length film, the all-archival documentary The Reagan Show, co-directed with Pacho Velez, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival before airing on CNN. She directed the Big Dan’s Tavern episode of the Netflix series Trial by Media about the first televised rape trial in the U.S. Her 2018 all-archival short film, Graven Image, aired on POV and is held at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2013 she produced the Academy Award-nominated film Cutie and the Boxer, which also won an Emmy Award for Best Documentary, and co-directed (with Jamila Wignot) Town Hall about the emergent Tea Party movement, for PBS. She has also worked as an archival researcher for many artists including Jim Jarmusch and Adam Pendleton. She was a Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow, a fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, and is a board member of Screen Slate.

FILMOGRAFIA

Town Hall (coregia Jamila Wignot, doc, 2013), New Year Part 1 (coregia Adam Shecter, cm, doc, 2014), The Reagan Show (coregia Pacho Velez, doc, 2017), Graven Image (cm, doc, 2017), Big Dan’s Tavern (ep. Trial by Media, Processi mediatici, tv, doc, 2020), The Business of Thought: A Recorded History of Artists Space (cm, doc, 2020), The Rifleman (cm, doc, 2021), Riotsville, Usa (doc, 2022).

Declaration

film director

“Making this film was about more than detailing the precise governmental and political machinations that lead to this specific training program. It was about making sense of the Riotsville footage; for me that is what the filmmaking process always is. How do you situate Riotsville within the legacy of 1968, reconciling living memory and mythology? How do you situate it within the life of the communities most affected by the state violence the performances at Riotsville are illustrating, and within the activism organizing to oppose it? And crucially, how do you situate it within a nation founded on white supremacism, determined to launch a war against its Black citizens, on a loop for hundreds of years? These questions informed the form and shape of the film; a mapping of structural forces that could not seem more urgent in 2022, with all the violence and possibility it contains.”

Cast

& Credits

DIRECTOR: Sierra Pettengill. SCREENPLAY: Tobi Haslett. FILM EDITING: Nels Bangerter. MUSIC: Jace Clayton. PRODUCERS: Sara Archambault Jamila Wignot.

CONTACT:
Darik Janik dmk_world@yahoo.com.au
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