Still from Ask Angola.
Writer and actress Liza Jessie Peterson says there was no better location than the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, to perform her one-woman show about prison labor. Angola sits on a former plantation; Norris Henderson, the founder & executive director of VOTE (Voice of the Experienced), recalls picking cotton there as a former inmate. But “The Peculiar Patriot” was shut down by authorities in the middle of the performance, and Peterson and Henderson have ideas as to why.
What difference can a play make? That’s the question at the heart of “Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices From a Plantation Prison”, presented by Aubin Pictures and MTV Documentaries. The film recounts what happened on that day and why Peterson was silenced. She tells me her performance posed a threat because it touched a nerve; her message about prison labor being modern day slavery “woke up sleeping giants” and frightened their overseers.
Peterson is retiring from her role in “The Peculiar Patriot” after 25 years, but the show will continue and its impact will live on for decades to come. “Angola Do You Hear Us?” is streaming now on Paramount+, and this year, Aubin Pictures is celebrating their 30-year anniversary. You may remember founder Catherine Gund on the show alongside writer and performer Jacqueline Woodson discussing their docu-poem “Meanwhile.” Stories like these have the power to inspire and activate audiences — that’s what we’re all about here at Laura Flanders & Friends.
I sat down with Gund recently to discuss the last three decades of Aubin Pictures and what this achievement means for her “impact production company”. In Gund’s words, she uses journalism, reporting and multimedia production to “make social justice more interesting and irresistible.”
“I think art and activism are the same thing. You can’t really separate them for me because I think that artists are imagining something that doesn’t exist,” she says. “ . . . [Activists] spend their lives and their journalistic brain and their strategic mind and all of their hours working towards a different world, a new place. Hope is really about believing that that exists and that we can have a role in making it.”
