C. A. Griffith

C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan's award-winning film, Mountains That Take Wing, covers over 100 years of social movement history and the ways ordinary people have done extraordinary things in the face of extreme hatred and injustice. For nearly a decade, it headlined the Women Make Movies special collection, EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN WOMEN, ORDINARY LIVES and continues to be featured at film screenings and events around the globe.

Mountains That Take Wing (2009, 97 minutes). Thirteen years, two radical activist all-stars-one conversation. Internationally renowned scholar, professor and writer Angela Davis and 89-year-old grassroots organizer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Yuri Kochiyama spent over a decade conversing intimately about personal histories and influences that shaped them and their overlapping experiences. Mountains That Take Wing offers the gift of these two remarkable women’s lives, sharing the pair’s recorded exchanges in 1996 and 2008. The film’s unique format honors the scope and depth of their knowledge on topics ranging from Jim Crow laws and Japanese American internment camps, to Civil Rights, anti-war, women’s and gay liberation movements, to today’s campaigns for political prisoners and prison reform. Intercut with compelling period footage, Davis and Kochiyama’s cogent observations, keen analyses, and steadfast resolve to create a more equitable, humane world offer inspiring lessons in empowerment and community building for current and future generations.

América's Home (2014, 63 minutes). Before Hurricane Maria lacerated Puerto Rico, América “Meca” Sorrentini-Blaut, a septuagenarian on fixed income, struggled to transform her family’s home into Casa Sofia, a cultural center named after her mother. When developers offered Meca $2-million dollars to knock down Casa Sofia, she turned them down. Meca, her contemporaries and young people in a dozen communities across rapidly gentrifying San Juan fought, and sometimes won, to save their homes and neighborhoods from being bulldozed and disappeared by condo and hotel developers. América’s Home is an enchanting panorama of the transformative power of the cultural arts, community and belonging. It is a testament to the resilience of the Puerto Rican people on the island and in Chicago. 

Bad Form: Queer, Broke & Amazing! (2022, 99 minutes) is a genre busting exploration of the struggles and triumphs of low income LGBTQ+ people and their communities in the U.S. The documentary refreshingly challenges the myth of gay affluence to reveal an extraordinary world of over 80 broke, but not broken LGBTQ+ people surviving, thriving, and trying to everyone free…from the Deep South to the Southwest, to queer coastal meccas and points in-between.