ADAMU CHAN
Tangled Roots is a short film about Las Deltas, a California community fighting for their existence and collective memory in the face of erasure
About the Artist
Adamu Chan is a filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. He produced numerous short films while incarcerated, using his vantage point and experience as an incarcerated person as a lens to focus the viewer’s gaze on issues related to social justice.
In 2021, he was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films, and was tapped to produce and direct his film What These Walls Won’t Hold, which won Best Documentary Mid-Length at the 2023 San Francisco international Film Festival. In 2022, Adamu directed a documentary short for the doc-series Bridge Builders, partnering with ITVS/Independent Lens, about a community member working at the intersections of immigration, incarceration, and gender justice. He is also a 2022 Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Mellon Arts Fellow and a 2023 Rockwood Institute Documentary Leaders Fellow. Adamu draws inspiration and energy from the voices of those directly impacted and seeks to empower them to reshape the narratives that have been created about them through film.
Website | IG: @adamuismyfriend
About the Partner Organization
Communities for a Better Environment is one of the preeminent environmental justice organizations in the nation. The mission of CBE is to build people’s power in California’s communities of color and low income communities to achieve environmental health and justice by preventing and reducing pollution and building green, healthy and sustainable communities and environments.
Website
Artist’s Statement
As a Bay Area native, I have seen radical demographic and material changes over the course of my lifetime. As more and more communities get pushed out of this place to make room for our society’s elites, I see my art and political work as a commitment to communities who are fighting for their very existence in the face of erasure. I see my role as maintaining a collective memory of the people, places, and experiences that make up the Bay Area that are under threat of disappearing. My work is rooted in the belief that cultural strategies can drive political transformation, and to do this, directly-impacted people must have the resources and opportunities to tell their own stories authentically. This short film about the North Richmond community of Las Deltas is an expression of my deep commitment to communities that have been invisibilized, and who are trying to wrest back control of the narratives that have been created about them.
A companion booklet of oral histories with former residents of the Las Deltas community, including Devin Bryant, Khadija Gordan, Cheryl Hairston, Michelle Hersey, Malika Sanders, Charlene Rogers, and LaQuisha Thomas. Interviews and editing by Juleon Robinson and Hannah Phalen.