REPARATIVE MEDIA
Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
We are more connected than ever before.
So why has it felt like our cultural divisions, our deepest collective wounds, are intensifying?
If culture is an ecosystem, corporations control too much land for harvesting our attention, connections, knowledge, and data. They serve us culture and information as fast food: monoculturally farmed then quickly packaged, produced, and distributed for us to binge for entertainment.
Can we cultivate a better system? When we view culture as an ecosystem, we see that diversity, interdependence, and sustainability are key to our collective thriving. Healing our collective wounds—racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate—requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.
Reparative Media imagines this community-driven process as a cookout: spaces where we all own and share organically crafted and ancestry-informed nourishment. This book offers a story and framework for storytellers, scholars, organizers, and funders trying to start or sustain such projects.
This book explores reparative media through the story of researching and developing OTV | Open Television. You can think of OTV like Netflix but independent, locally rooted, and powered by intersectionality. OTV’s app hosts films and series by Chicago-based artists who identify with multiple communities historically marginalized by systems, or intersectionality.
You can read the full Reparative Media book here. You can read the Offerings for Consent presented to artists in advance of publication here.
On this page, you’ll learn more about the individual films and series discussed in the book.
For a preview of these series, check out this super trailer:
Kings and Queens
Kings and Queens (2019)
Written and directed by: Rachel Relman
Cinematography by: Paige Hochstatter
We almost never see drag kings and queens leading the same narrative, but Rachel Relman brings them together in their pilot of the same name.
Stevie Stars (Amber Wallin) and Polly Glamory (Dominique Watkins a.k.a. Bambi Banks-Coulee, daughter of Shea Coulee) are the drag king and queen personas of Leah and Michael, two friends who are trying to make it big in drag. RuPaul’s Drag Race, referenced throughout the story, has made drag a big business, even though Black queens and drag kings remain marginalized. “I love drag so much,” Rachel added, but “there’s no drag king representation…there are some dope drag kings in Chicago,” they said.
“I hadn’t seen any fictionalized representation of drag on TV [prior to 2019 when the pilot was released]…I wanted to put my own spin on it. Chicago Drag in particular is a really incredible scene, and I wanted to showcase that. I'm a standup comic, so I wanted it to be funny and relatable, but also something that people can sink their teeth into.”
In the pilot Stevie Stars and Polly Glamory are making their debut as a duo in a drag competition. We see their friendship in their banter, like when Michael/Polly, responding to Leah/Stevie’s ironic flirting, states: “Michael is a gay man, Polyglamory is a lesbian.”
Kings and Queens showcases a strong slice of Chicago’s queer artists, not just in its two leads. There’s an appearance from Abhijeet Rane, a queer artist who hosts many club nights in the city, performances from comedians George Elrod and Jesse Kendall, and the climactic performance scene of the pilot features music from queer duo Glitter Moneyyy.
Drag artist Aunty Chan (Jamie Meun) and actor Em Modaff almost steal the show as two coffee shop workers, Matthew and Becca, who eventually serve our leads. Playing different genders and sexualities, they have fun poking at the differences in the queer cultures in which they both participate, like when Matthew asks how Becca has had sex with their latest partner. Becca responds:
“I am a Top Sun, Switch Rising, Power Bottom Moon. Queer community exists outside of Boystown and cis gay men!”
“I need you to educate me. I’m from Ohio,” Matthew responds.
Such crackling dialogue is the joy of Kings and Queens, as if the audience has been dropped into a queer community that in many ways is like how TV traditionally portrays family. It’s a very Chicago vibe.”
“I don't think people outside of here, or outside of the scene, fully understand how amazing it is, how beautiful it is.” Rachel said of the Chicago queer nightlife community in 2019 upon the pilot’s release. “I hope that our project is able to give the world a small glimpse and encourage people to make art and support local drag”.
F*ck Stan
F*ck Stan (2019)
Written and directed by: Marrissa Coccaro
Representations of sexual assault on television can be highly sensationalized, involving high-powered perpetrators or survivors, excessive violence, or generally unrealistic circumstances.
In the revenge comedy F*ck Stan, Marrissa Coccaro grounds her central conflict in a much more common but no less violent: the situation of a man (Stan) who refuses to wear protection and often manipulates women into sex without it. Margo (Marrissa Coccaro) is tricked into it, while Stan tries to slip it in Jacks (Sarah Patin) without her noticing. Vicky (Katherine Mraz) struggles with men who are wearing the wrong size: “Do you know how hard it is to tell a man he’s wearing the wrong size condom?”
Three women realize they have been victimized by the same man and enact a plot to rob him.
By showing three different experiences, Marrissa’s series serves a pedagogical function of showing women the spectrum of experiences that constitute sexual violence, while also showing ways to demand consent. The series shows how men benefit when women don’t talk to each other about their experiences and stand up for themselves.
Still, most of the series is a darkly comic tale of revenge where the women realize that Stan is more than he appears, though not necessarily less of a jerk than they think.
Ultimately the series embraces complexity and welcomes viewers to be open to surprises in pursuit of justice.
Border’d
Border’d (2019-2022)
Starring, created, co-directed and produced by: Lauryn Lugo, Andrew & Adrian Nuño
How do we break down the borders we set on who we are and can be?
Lauryn Lugo, with twin brothers Andrew and Adrian Nuño explore this question in their drama series Border’d. The series follows three Latine siblings, the Castillos, who return home for their father’s funeral. The journey reveals that the distance they feel between their family and each other is not just physical. Featuring confident, sensitive acting from both established and emerging performers, Border’d screened in multiple festivals, was nominated for Best Drama at Stareable Fest, and was the recipient of several awards including a Telly Award.
The series is masterfully written and directed to communicate the quiet ways people reveal and hide themselves. The second episode, written by Lauryn Lugo, follows the return of the siblings after hearing news of their father’s passing. Grief is notoriously challenging to portray on screen, but Lugo's script says a lot without dialogue. We see the Castillos’ mother sleeping in bed with the empty spot next to her; as she tries to make it tidy, she ends up showing her anger. We see Gabriel (Adrian) in his childhood room festooned with post-its that show his growth edges; on the inside door opening up to the rest of the house he’s written: “take 3 deep breaths, focus, be vocal,” the latter ironic given the weightiness of the moment. At the end of the episode, the four sit down for breakfast with Mexican conchas at the center of the table. Raphael (Andrew) reaches for one and his mom immediately smacks his hand. They don’t eat before saying grace, especially on this day. Border’d is a masterclass in showing not telling the story.
Border’d was inspired by real life experiences.
“I always felt there was a sort of disconnect between who I was, who I grew up to be and the culture that my family grew up on” - Adrian Nuño said. “I really wanted to make a show that was more closely correlated to my experience growing up, not just as someone who was disconnected from the culture, but on top of already being someone who's a person of color. I also, of course, ended up coming out as someone who was queer, so that caused an even bigger disconnect.”
His brother echoed this feeling that the intersections of their identity as queer Latine men who did not grow up in Spanish-speaking communities led to feeling distanced from their culture.
“I felt many times growing up that I had to be sort of the spokesperson for communities that just weren't terribly prevalent where I grew up,” Andrew said, adding “machismo and masculinity complicates Latine identity.”
Nevertheless, the team leaned heavily on their community to get the show done. With a lean $15,000 budget, they raised 80% of it crowdfunding. They spoke about the show with whomever would listen, even Uber drivers.
“That was a lot of just pulling resources from the community, from random people that I had talked to at film festivals, and really trying to show the worth of the show,” Andrew said. “The reason that this show exists is because of the kindness of other people.”
These kindnesses included the restaurant owner that let them film there during off-hours, or their director of photography Daniel Gebert who brought his own equipment. Production manager Thomas Seffernick coordinated complex film days, like the reunion that featured almost two dozen extras. And then there’s the post-production workers like sound designer Henry Hawks and additional VFX/editors who fixed errors, or their composers Emmanuel Roldan and Anthony Esparza turning around new versions of songs in days. Money is only one resource in production, and, for indies like Border’d, is not the only resource you need.
All of this happened before and during the pandemic, which caused additional hurdles. Right before the pandemic, The Castillo matriarch Michelle Jasso, got cast in a national production of a play so they had to shoot her scenes in two weekends. This ended up being fortuitous because they locked her scene before COVID happened. Still, they had to wait to film the rest of the season, and they wrapped the second half right before the second COVID wave. Overall, Border’d was a multi-year process, as the team produced and released the pilot in 2019 before filming the rest of the season and being released in 2021.
In all, Border’d is a shining example of the hard, complex work indie creators perform to tell stories that are never or rarely told on larger platforms!