The Documentary: The Neutral Ground
The Director: CJ Hunt
The Story: In December 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four
Confederate monuments from public grounds. A forceful group of critics
protested the decision, and fearing retaliation, no crew would agree to remove
the statues.
The Interview:
Director and producer CJ Hunt was kind enough to take time to join the podcast right in the middle of The Neutral ground's festival run and PBS debut. The film will be available to watch for free on PBS as the season premiere episode of the POV documentary series beginning on July 5th.
The Review:
You know, you feel like you know what's going on in the world and what people
are capable of when it comes to racism, colonialism, and generational
indoctrination especially with what we have seen over the last year but then a
documentary like this comes out and still manages to be shocking, perplexing,
and at times baffling. The way this country is divided in it's fundamental
beliefs about slavery, race, and freedom can be quite astonishing when you see
the faces and hear the thoughts of people who have varying mindsets and, even
when you know the how and why someone thinks the way they do, it can still
make your head hurt.
"How can you scream Black Lives Matter when everything around you in the city
says they don't." - Michael “Quess” Moore of Take 'em Down Nola
CJ Hunt, who is a comedian by trade among his many talents, set out to cover a
story in New Orleans about the struggles of getting some confederate monuments
taken down and ended up going down a rabbit hole of racism so deeply embedded
in southern culture that people are so on board with what they believe that
even documented facts can not sway them. I mean seriously, he showed people
where the secession documents for multiple southern states specifically talked
about slavery as a primary talking point and they all just said nope, slavery
isn't that bad, it's just kind of bad and not a reason to separate the
country.
So, how do you change people's minds? I think this documentary shows how that
might not be the goal and that maybe we should be looking at educating the
next generation. After the events of the last year, there has been an
awakening and a reckoning of sorts and we're all beginning to learn some of
the hard truths about America, it's people, and it's history. What started as
a comedic documentation of the civil proceedings turned into an exploration
not just of why people are so steadfast about keeping these monuments up but
it seemed like Hunt himself was also sorting out why this was so important to
him.
The Verdict:
The Neutral Ground is a documentary that should be shown in
classrooms and seminars and film festivals and just about anywhere a movie
can be shown so people can learn just how systemic of a problem racism is
and maybe we can start to turn the corner just a little.
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