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:
Craft Service
Created by: Jenna Anast
Welcome to Craft Service, an experience that shares recipes for nourishment, recipes for success, spells and stories. I believe that with imagination, play, and application we can create the world we want to see. If you believe this too, this is the show for you! And if you don’t believe, well, we hope to change your mind. So come take a journey with me. We are everything we need.
In Craft Service, creator Jenna Anast shares ritual, performance, conversation, and healing to unite Black and Brown people around the world.
A documentary series propelled by an experimental vibe, Craft Service is a journey revealing how art and community heal. From Chicago to Johannesburg and Guadalajara, Jenna introduces us to everyday and extraordinary people working to create beauty for themselves and the people they love.
Season one takes place in Chicago and Johannesburg. Comedian Hannibal Buress launches the show with Jenna in OTV’s studio with a conversation on sauteed spinach and evolves into a spirited defense of ashiness. Between is an interlude cuts in with a shot of spinach on a pan, over which Jenna recites affirmation: “Write a letter to the person you will become. Breeeeeeeaathe. Drink water. Stretch. Ask for help! Write a love letter to the person you are now. Be Present!” Here we see how the show concocts recipes for casting live-affirming spells and embracing one’s messiness, with a helpful hint to remember to eat your veggies.
But this isn’t your typical self-care delivery mechanism as we’ve come to know on social media. Beyond affirmations the show serves documentation of interpersonal and community conversations.
In season 2, Jenna explores Black and Brown/Latiné solidarity. They travel to Pilsen in Chicago, historically a Mexican-American enclave, to make art and candles with people of all ages. That year, Pilsen was the epicenter of Black and Brown tensions. During the 2020 Black Lives Matters uprising, Pilsen residents assaulted and intimidated Black people on the street, even people who had lived there for years. A Pilsen resident, Jenna had to flee the neighborhood for several weeks as they were publicly supporting many of the most public activists.
Returning to Pilsen after the heat subsided, Jenna talks to Pilsen resident, Black and Brown, about what the neighborhood and their communion meant to them:
“Part of me holding space here is bringing that Black and Brown solidarity that I know exists together again, eliminate these borders that have always been in Chicago,” says Jenna, Elmwood Park-born and raised. “There’s no separation and the love is there, and especially Black and Brown people need to love on each other.”
In interviews holding their candles and creations, an intergenerational group of people discuss their dreams for the Pilsen community, most discussing the importance of connection–to youth, to the neighborhood, to each other–amid the gentrification of the neighborhood.
Then Jenna flys to Guadalajara. While assisting OTV’s Brave Futures program, Jenna spoke with Hector Macias Nuño. As Jenna speaks about their death doula journey, Hector talks about their journey with Catholicism, going deeper into it in their youth but then leaving it, breaking generational traumas that limited their opportunity to explore their own sovereignty.
The conversation grows into one of breaking curses in our family line by reminding ourselves of our joy and freedom, which are, ultimately, the most essential ingredients to any divine spell!
For Better
For Better (2019)
Created and written by: Ashley Lackinger
In For Better, Ashley Lackinger asks: what are the different ways people fall in, out, and back in love with each other?
As the title suggests, when we commit to partnership, we commit “for better” or, implicitly, for worse, but we strive to be better, even if we’re not always at our best.
“I wanted to do an inclusive rom-com, reinvent the rom-com,” Ashley said.
The anthology dramedy series spotlights three different relationships – two gay, one straight, all interracial – and shows how even when people are coming from different cultures, they go on similar journeys of trying to reach for each other.
The first episode is particularly masterful in orchestrating this theme visually, almost like a silent film as Millennial rom-com. Two men is opposite building entertain each other from across the alley until one reveals he has a boyfriend. We see their relationship evolve, and wonder where there will be space for new love. It all builds to a charming meet-cute.
Lest viewers think For Better idealizes love, episode two focuses on disagreements between established gay couples (only hinted at in episode one). We see couples “fake it” for friends and provoke real conversations between each other, revealing traumas and desires that are often hard to vocalize (particularly gay men socialized to not express their vulnerabilities).
In all, For Better delivered an engagingly crafted dramedy on a lean budget.
Ashley worked hard to create a production experience where mentorship was possible and where crew members, even production assistants, were able to offer input on everything from the script to the filmmaking. “If people are going to give you their time, it has to be valuable to them.”
Inspired by OTV to produce her first narrative series, For Better gave Ashley an opportunity to meet new crew members and expand her skills, something she says was ideal to do in Chicago.
“I just feel the Chicago community in general is just very supportive. I don’t feel a cutthroat competition. It really does feel like we want to help. For some reason in the film industry it’s much more collaborative and helpful.”