CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION (2028 ANTICIPATED RELEASE)
SYNOPSIS.
Study and Struggle is a feature-length creative nonfiction film that examines public higher education as a historical structure shaped by land, power, and exclusion. Moving across four U.S. land-grant universities, the film asks what it means to learn inside institutions built through Indigenous dispossession, racialized labor, and extraction — and what other forms of study already exist alongside them.
The project brings together historians, educators, students, land defenders, and community scholars whose work traces both the foundations of the university and the struggles that have continually sought to transform it. Rather than treating education as a neutral good, the film approaches study as a political practice: one entangled with questions of sovereignty, governance, and accountability to place.
Formally, Study and Struggle moves between institutional interiors and the land itself, filmed on 16mm. Land is not presented as backdrop but as a living archive and teacher, interrupting the university’s linear narratives of progress with cycles of renewal, refusal, and persistence. Protest, pedagogy, and landscape are held in relation, revealing how struggle is not an exception to these spaces, but one of their continuities.
The film emerges from years of research, listening, and lived experience inside public universities. It is not an exposé, but an inquiry — one that invites viewers to reconsider what education has been built to do, what it has cost, and what might become possible if learning were accountable to land and to one another.
collaborators.
Producer
Julianna Brannum is a documentary filmmaker based in Oklahoma. She served as Consulting Producer on The American Buffalo, directed by Ken Burns, and as Director and Producer of the short film Homecoming, a companion to Burns’ two part series, both coming to PBS in Fall 2023. She was Director/Producer of the PBS documentary LaDonna Harris: Indian 101 for which she won fellowships from the Sundance Institute/Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation/Tribeca Film Institute. She was Producer of the Independent Lens documentary, Conscience Point, Series Producer on the 2018 Emmy-nominated PBS series, Native America, and Producer of Through the Repellent Fence, which screened at MoMA and SxSW. She also served as Co-producer for Stanley Nelson’s We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee. Brannum made her directorial debut with The Creek Runs Red which aired on Independent Lens in 2007 and is a citizen of the Quahada band of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma.
Executive Producer
Edgar Villanueva (Lumbee) is an award-winning author, speaker, and strategist working at the intersection of wealth and spirituality. He is the founder and CEO of the Decolonizing Wealth Project and its donor community fund Liberated Capital, and author of the bestselling book Decolonizing Wealth (2018, 2021). Since launching DWP in 2018, Villanueva has emerged as a leading voice in reshaping philanthropy through an Indigenous lens, advancing a global movement grounded in collective healing and reparative action. A 2025 Time 100 Climate Leader, Villanueva holds a BSPH and MHA from the Gillings Global School of Public Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe and resides in New York City. Publications including the New York Times, NPR, Barron’s, Teen Vogue, Vox, and Forbes magazine have featured Villanueva and his work. Villanueva has contributed to the Washington Post, the Advocate, and Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Executive Producer
Kevin Jennings is a longtime social justice leader. Among his many accomplishments are helping students create the nation’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in 1988 and serving as the Assistant Secretary of Education for Safe & Drug-Free Schools in the Obama Administration. He has been an Executive Producer on several documentary films, including Lavender Scare (PBS), Dalton’s Dream (BBC), and Welcome to Chechnya, which was short-listed for the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Kevin also served as Co-Executive Producer on Free Leonard Peltier (Sundance). He is currently the CEO of Lambda Legal.
Associate Producer
Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition. She is also a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
Associate Producer
Dylan Rodriguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has worked at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Dylan served as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies from 2009-2016, Chair of the UCR Academic Senate from 2016-2020, and has worked as the Co-Director of the UCR Center for Ideas and Society since 2021. As the Co-Director of the Center, he created the Decolonizing Humanism programming stream, which features scholars, artists, and intellectuals based in revolutionary, anti-colonial, and liberationist movements from all over the world. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association by his peers in 2020, the same year in which he was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars, a national award program that intends to “recognize the role that Freedom Scholars play in cultivating and nurturing movements for justice and freedom.”
PROJECT SUPPORTERS
Chicken and Egg Films — Development Grant 2024
Connecticut Humanities — Implementation Grant 2026