Travis Wilkerson

With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.

A family trip across the American West becomes an essay film about nuclear threats past and present. The apocalypse is omnipresent, and the journey shows that destruction has long since become inscribed into the landscape and history of the country.

The first of two two Videographic essays with critical reflections on representations of the Vietnam War. “Full Metal Kuleshov Effect,” counterposes the work of Stanley Kubrick with that of Santiago Alvarez and the Vietnamese director Hai Ninh.​

Restore the classical definition of planet! Bring back planet Pluto! The solar system is twelve!

A mysterious film. Nearly lost. A portrait of a 25 hour song. One hour for each year in the life of a friend.

An experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana.

“In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins Travis Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed documentary, DID YOU WONDER WHO FIRED THE GUN?, which takes us on a journey through the American South to uncover the truth behind a horrific incident and the societal mores that allowed it to happen. Acting as narrator and guide, Wilkerson spins a strange, frightening tale, incorporating scenes from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, the music of Janelle Monáe and Phil Ochs, and the story of Rosa Parks’ investigation into the Recy Taylor case, as well as his own family history, for a gripping investigation into our collective past and its echoes into the present day.

For the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, a simple pairing: images of the site of the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado; the sounds of fireworks from my neighborhood recorded on the 4th of July.

"...In the film, Wilkerson presents four interviewees. Two are widows whose family members (one husband, one son) were Afghan vets who committed suicide. The other two are women who lost family members because Detroit Edison turned off their electricity during the winter. Wilkerson does nothing to draw parallels between these two forms of injustice. Rather, by simply juxtaposing the women’s stories, we are able to see how systematic indifference to human life takes multiple forms, but comes back to the same root causes, and how we are indeed fighting the same war against the poor and disenfranchised at home and abroad – ici et ailleurs. – Michael Sicinski, Mubi Notebook.

The opening, Los Angeles today, at dusk. In this first instalment of a series about the police in the United States, Travis Wilkerson seeks to trace the early activities of the Red Squad section of the municipal police, under the zealous tutelage of its figurehead in the 1920s and 30s, William “Red” Hynes. Of him, we only see a face and a gesture, revolver pointed at the person photographing him. His mission? To track down, flush out and threaten communist activists. Infiltration and intimidation were the lot of this political militia purposely created to break any hint of social or political subversion.

In depressed Butte, Montana, young men struggle to forge modest lives and make sense of it all.

National Archive: V.1 uses archival U.S. military footage to depict a series of aerial attacks on Vietnamese sites. Simple and affecting, the work shares an affinity with Bruce Conners Crossroads by giving viewers time to contemplate the tragedy of war.

A haunted man desperately searches for his lost love through an illegal pirate radio broadcast. Punk-agit-noir.

SAND CREEK EQUATION uses a poetic narrative style to explore the horrendous parallels linking the 2008-2009 war on the Gaza Strip with the 1864 Native American massacre in Sand Creek, Colorado.

A father tells his sons the epic yet nonchalant tale of his airborne "exploits" in Vietnam.

If there is anyone who embodies the current state of life in Croatia, it is the police detective Ivan Peric. The son of a fisherman, he became a detective as a way of avoiding working in the only really prospering industry of present-day Croatia – tourism. Now his life is consumed by trying to solve a series of essentially unsolvable murders of tourists. Because the tourists are so widely despised, no one will help Ivan. Evidence disappears into the labyrinth of bureaucracy. He is humiliated in public and online. In the local press, his boss even labels him an “uhljeb”, the Croatian slur for a “lazy bureaucratic parasite”. All of this takes place in the city of Split, where the breakup of Yugoslavia has left its mark.

Out of respect for his parents' request, four and one half minutes of silence for Michael Brown Jr. One minute for each hour his body lay in the streets of Ferguson, MO after he was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson. Please watch in darkness. Please watch in silence.

A portrait of the great radical Cuban film maker Santiago Alvarez.

A monument to the Tlatelolco student massacre of 1968 in Mexico City, ten days before the Olympics. Hundred of students were disappeared. A grotesque tradition - the complete physical obliteration of students organizing for progressive change - was hurled into motion. This film is nearly wordless. In place of words, the enactment of violence against the images themselves, in a stagger towards commensurate aesthetics.

Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reveal the hidden costs of the United States' (and Canada's) most expensive and longest-running war. (TIFF)