Cuba Scalds His Hand

Made over five years, Jordan Lord’s feature-length documentary Shared Resources depicts the filmmaker and their family after Lord’s father was fired from his job as a debt collector and their parents declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

This essay film asks what it means to be an audience, in the wake of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which claims but often fails to prohibit discrimination against disabled workers and audiences in the United States. Tangling common sense representations of disability, labor, and national identity, the film questions the purported goodness of putting disabled people to work in underpaid contexts ranging from captioning and transcribing to fabricating textiles for the U.S. military.

A slippery, “archival” documentary deconstructing the unlikely rise of a right-wing political strategist who began as a “leftist documentary filmmaker”. Through creative audio description, Lord re-mediates YouTube and broadcast media to probe how documentary tools become weapons in contemporary culture wars—from attacks on critical race theory, to campaigns against Black women leaders and the machinery of US mass deportation.