This screening is a free community event, but you must reserve your ticket ahead of time.

Welcome to RIOTSVILLE, USA, a turning point in American history where the protest movements of the late 1960s came into conflict with increasingly militarized police departments.

Focusing on unearthed military training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” where military and police were trained to respond to civil disorder in the aftermath of the Kerner Commission created by President Lyndon B. Johnson, director Sierra Pettengill’s kaleidoscopic all-archival documentary reconstructs the formation of a national consciousness obsessed with maintaining law and order by any means necessary. Drawing insight from a time similar to our own, RIOTSVILLE, USA pulls focus on American institutional control and offers a compelling case that if the history of race in America rhymes, it is by design.

Following RIOTSVILLE, USA, the short experimental documentary BENEATH THE CONCRETE, THE FOREST (2023) will take us inside an ongoing struggle in Atlanta to determine the future of Weelaunee, the biggest contiguous urban forest in the country.

After the films, please stay for a panel discussion with community members: A Forest Defender who has spent time in Atlanta, Chris Harris from the Austin Justice Coalition, Candice Bernd from Truthout, and Idris Robinson, Professor at Texas State University. Before and after the event, raffle tickets will be sold to benefit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.

The Weelaunee Defense Society is an international network in solidarity with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement—a decentralized social movement that sprang up in resistance to the plans by the Atlanta Police Foundation to build a 90-acre militarized police training facility dubbed “Cop City” in the largest urban forest in the country.