Halpate
Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century. As the practice has changed over the years, Halpate profiles the hazards and history of the spectacle through the words of the tribe's alligator wrestlers themselves and what it has meant to their people's survival.
Adam Khalil
Adam Piron
Also Directed by Adam Khalil
Half tongue-in-cheek absurdism and half deadly earnest, CULTURE CAPTURE: TERMINAL ADDITION continues the New Red Order’s ongoing project of “culture capture,” recruiting viewers to participate in a program of practical strategies to counter the “salvage mindset,” which sets aside Indigenous culture and sovereignty by consigning it to the past. These strategies include using new, accessible technologies, such as smartphone apps that produce 3D scans of objects, both of Indigenous material that museums and other institutions may hold and public monuments that celebrate and re-affirm the norms of European settler culture.
a Rastafarian vampire film starring and co-written by Oba, an artist and musician based in Brooklyn. Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, human trafficking and blood sucking, the film reimagines Oba’s origin story. In the late 15th century, Oba is shipped as cargo from West Africa to the Caribbean, where he is seduced by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring his undying allegiance to the colonial project. As the centuries blow by, Oba and Columbus work behind the scenes, pulling the strings of ‘new world’ geopolitics as they spread vampirism across the Western Hemisphere. Combining film forms and genre tropes, Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question: How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?
Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality morphs monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, clearing space for Indigenous futures. The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features high-profile monuments such as the equestrian Theodore Roosevelt statue which stood in front of AMNH in New York City and End of the Trail, both created by American sculptor James Earle Frasier. The video mines the archive of Frasier, going beyond simple iconoclasm to probe deeper, investigating desires for indigeneity that motivated the artist, desires that continue to pervade the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called americas.
A welcome as warning, AlienNATION [star spangled], asks viewers if they’ve ever wondered how to be here? How to leave? How to arrive? Then presents an eerie, guilt ridden, yet self-congratulatory stew of televised recordings of public apologies to Indigenous peoples from the heads of state of settler-colonial nations around the globe.
An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.
Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.
With this first feature, Adam and Zack Khalil reinvent the historical narrative in the form of a kaleidoscopic and conjecture-rich essay. Their work makes their community, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, resonate with the ancient Ojibway prophecy of the seven fires, a premonition of the arrival of white people. Using video effects, animation and off-kilter editing, and combining testimonials, experimental sequences and performances, the filmmakers brilliantly demolish linear filmic narrative – not to mention the Western concept of history. Overflowing with inventiveness, INAATE/SE/ revives traditional spirituality and culture, confronts an obfuscated colonial reality, and works toward building a modern identity.
This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities in order to indigenize.
A video which introduces potential NRO informants and accomplices to the concept of Savage PhilosophyTM, which asserts that signs have a real and physical connection with things, that signs take part in things instead of taking their place. Savage Philosophy operates through discourse, which is not merely an instrument for the communication of thought, but an occasion for the deployment of forces. If magic confuses representation with reality, savage philosophy makes representation into reality. This introductory video explores Savage Philosophy’s potential to realize Indigenous futures.
The distant future. An orbital facility of unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will finally be repaid... through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too-familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit. We, the resurrected, overwhelmed by a literal second life, will of course discover our one inevitable destination: a place to sit, have a drink, and talk it out.
Also Directed by Adam Piron
It’s difficult to pass down a language as complex as that of the Kiowa Tribe–but that doesn’t stop its members from trying to do just that. This experimental documentary short combines audio captured from language lessons with breathtaking shots of the Great Plains.