It has been a while since I filmed something. Last winter’s Vampire music video was my last full offering, and I have mostly taken an extended break from this art form for most of the last two years.
I have been itching to do more lately but to do so in ways that are sustainable, meaningful, and fun. (Filmmaking, as it turns out, is not for the faint of heart.) The video posted above is a step in that direction. It’s not perfect, but I am actually okay with that. The rough edges add their own depth.
I wanted to create a way to share my thoughts that was engaging but not typical. I actually filmed a lot more footage for this, but I found that the simplicity you see in the end result magnified what I needed to say.
The piano music is a little piece I composed a while ago, and I hope you’ll forgive what I did for the last the 30 seconds of this short video post.
Today, I was only going to post what you have read above, but over the last couple of days, more crushing developments unraveled here in the U.S. that have been weighing heavily on my mind.
A student at Columbia University named Mahmoud Khalil, who has a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, was detained for leading student protests against Israel’s violent genocidal destruction of Palestine and Gaza last year. (Click Here to write to Congress to set him free.) Without being charged for a crime, he is being held at an undisclosed immigrant detention facility with the intent to have him deported.
What does it mean when you can be lawfully arrested and disappeared for speaking your mind out in public? This means that we have a government led by people who want to silence any form of dissent. There are now reports that the State Department will be combing through social media looking for people with pro-Palestinian content. They are creating dangerous precedents.
I have been asking myself if I should scrub my Instagram feed of pro-Palestine posts and if I should hold off from participating in protests against our state and federal government’s fascist actions. Being a queer immigrant activist who is not white, I cannot help but feel more vulnerable to this administration’s authoritarian initiatives.
But if I stay silent and hold back, then they have won. This is exactly what they want.
I cannot give them what they want.
For now, I will not stay silent, and I will not hold back.
If any of you have any thoughts to share on this matter, I would love to hear them through a reply to this email.
What can I do?
What are you doing?
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