CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION (2027 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.

PROJECT SUPPORTERS

Chicken and Egg Films — Development Grant 2024