Synopsis
Director: Sierra Pettengill
Producers: Sara Archambault, Jamila Wignot
91 min, US, 2022
Welcome to Riotsville, USA. In the wake of civil unrest erupting across America in the 1960s, the U.S. government constructed fake towns to train police officers and the National Guard to suppress protest. In this chilling cinematic inquiry, award-winning filmmaker and brilliant researcher Sierra Pettengill (The Reagan Show) marshals never-before-seen footage of excessive law enforcement—both real, from Chicago and Miami 1968, and imagined, on the main streets of Riotsville—to provocatively mine the history of America’s militant and racist policies of control. “Transfixing and troubling” (Indiewire), and an “impressive… arresting… damning portrait of the state” (The Hollywood Reporter), this indispensable film shows “how little our civic arguments about racism, policing, poverty and politics have changed in more than 50 years” (New York Times).