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:
Just Call Me Ripley
Just Call Me Ripley (2019)
Created, starring and written by: Jake Noll
Falling in love is harder when you’re finding yourself – and when others can’t seem to locate you.
Jake Noll’s Just Call Me Ripley is a comedy series about Ripley, a Chicagoan whose gender and sexuality confounds everyone around them and especially themselves.
One thing Ripley is clear on though is how much they want to date Krista (Rivkah Reyes) the handyperson. With bright and colorful montages and artful animations, we see Ripley fantasize over Krista, giving the series a romantic anchor, juxtaposed with starkly serious flashback of Ripley’s relationship with their ex-husband.
In pursuit of self, Ripley dates poets and corporate types, poly couples and horny enbies, turning Ripley on or off. The series is buoyant romp through Chicago’s queer community, where Ripley goes on terrible dates or falls too quickly and processes their anxiety with a diverse cast of some stellar Chicago actors. “It’s a very Chicago-centric show. So I also love celebrating the talent of the city. We have a ton of comedian friends and coworkers that we'd love to get involved.”
Jake’s goal was to use comedy to show how gender and sexuality are complex and intertwined. Too often we talk about this in scolding tweet threads or serious essays, which are not the best forms to enlighten and inspire.
“I decided to do this project because it achieves what I try to do with my standup, which is to make difficult subjects more comfortable for people to consume and to sort of feel some catharsis with. I love to have catharsis through laughter and that I think this project really goes for,” Jake said.
Jake is a product of Chicago’s vibrant improv scene, arguably the best in the country. So they enlisted Second City Touring Company director Cassie Ahiers to direct. “I really do think that comedy is one of the best tools to talk about difficult subjects or things that maybe we're more divided on because it is such a safe way to allow people to have these conversations who might not be open to that conversation otherwise.”
Just Call Me Ripley appears to argue that we find ourselves through our relationship with others, whether a neighbor (played by Work in Progress’ Abby McEnany), lovers, those we crush or who crush on us .
United States of Aliens (U.S. Aliens)
United States of Aliens (U.S. Aliens) (2019)
Starring and created by: Aalisha Sheth and Nikkita Duke
Television’s representations of immigrants tend to extremes. Stories are either violent and dramatic tales of strife and woe, or quirky episodic comedies about heteronormative families.
This is not the case in the provocatively titled United States of Aliens (U.S. Aliens) co-created and written by Nikkita Duke and Aalisha Sheth, who were both MFA students at Northwestern University at the time.
In the comedy series, Indian and Nigerian single women navigate their misadventures of culturally assimilating into everyday American life. The series is an unfiltered look at the experiences of international students in America who live in deep uncertainty, caused by the lack of care and support extended by universities, financial institutions and sometimes one's own neighbors. They also poke fun at the ways immigration distances people from their loved ones back home, in ways that are both emotionally difficult, technically challenging, and sometimes freeing.
“We had never seen that point of view represented in a way,” Nikkita said of the show’s focus on young women from different cultures supporting each other while navigating the U.S. in an educational institution.
Despite their presence at a university with its ornate surroundings, both characters face issues surviving due to money and access to care. This is partially based on the creators’ real experiences. Uduak’s main storyline is trying to get money to pay for a broken laptop, which is critical for her completing her studies. As an immigrant, she doesn’t yet have a social security number, so getting credit or student loans are not really options. “Financially speaking, you may as well not exist,” a bank official tells her. So she participates in a university research study for some cash, but it turns out she gets a voucher instead. As Uduak contends with financial struggles, Rishita is flirting with a fellow “Thronie” or Game of Thrones fan. But her hookup is neither smooth nor sexy as she'd seen in the American television shows she grew up watching in India. Her bed frame breaks down, creating a noisy interruption that causes alarm to a white female neighbor and condo association member, who reprimands her for being loud and mispronounces her name. Upon learning that Rishita comes from India, the neighbor further imposes a fetishized orientalist gaze upon Rishita, whilst exclaiming that she has always wanted to travel to the east. “Her face gave me happy vibes but her words were killing me,” Rishita tells Uduak of her attempt to understand white Midwestern cultural norms.
“How do you survive when you’ve totally been outside?” Nikkita said of the character’s position in the story. Telling the story towards the end of a two-year program, the creators wanted to ask themselves how they figure things out.
Ultimately, the show serves a pedagogical function to prospective students from outside the United States who aspire to come to the United States, introducing them to some challenges they may not foresee.
“The show is a how-to guide for people coming here who don't have anyone,” Aalisha said. By focusing the series on cross-cultural friendship, ”it’s almost like the support system that they're creating while surviving individual experiences.”