(upbeat music) - Benjamin, he's a, you know this Marxist cultural theorist that I have appreciated since first learning about him in college.

In this kind of like intense 24-hour period that I was making this film.

Like the night before I was going out to shoot footage, I stumbled onto Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History."

Like, I'm like reading this before I'm going out to film and stumbling on these ideas again, kind of thinking about like the importance of remembering but then redeeming, doing more.

So it really influenced, clearly, because I sandwiched the film with quotes from him.

It really influenced and kind of like added way more weight to some of the things I was grappling with.

There's something really beautiful and powerful about having some, like some ideas and then falling down a rabbit hole and like finding someone who's articulating them so powerfully and adding to what you had been thinking about and opening new doors of understanding.

Between undergrad and grad school, I had three years and I worked for half of that time as a union organizer.

I became invested in struggles of abolition, struggles against police brutality, struggles against slumlords, struggles, you know, against prisons.

And so this time while I was union organizing and becoming involved in Occupy Philly was a real kind of political radicalization moment for me.

And so that work, staying involved in that work from wherever I've moved to wherever I've moved to wherever I've moved, et cetera, has been really, really important and really crucial and fuels the ways that I think about art and the roles of art and filmmaking and how they can encourage us or give us hope during difficult moments of contemporary political struggles.