PVCC Hosts Documentary Screening and Discussion
On April 3, a small crowd of around 20 people attended PVCC’s screening of the documentary film The Price of Resistance: Sala Udin, an American Agitator in the V. Earl Dickinson Building’s spacious Main Stage Theatre. The documentary follows the life of activist Sala Udin and his imprisonment and persecution at the hands of the FBI and its counterintelligence program COINTELPRO.
The doors of the theater opened at 7 p.m., and advertisements played on the projector as audience members walked in a few at a time. At 7:30, the lights went out, and the documentary started. The short documentary only ran for around thirty minutes, but it still managed to cover a lot of important details about Sala Udin’s life and accomplishments.
After the screening, one of the documentarians, Ty Cooper, came on stage alongside the city of Charlottesville’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania to discuss the making of the film, which was created by Cooper and Emmy award-winning producer Annette Banks. For the bulk of the discussion, Platania asked Cooper questions about his creative process and the challenges that went into the film’s creation.
Cooper said that one of the most difficult aspects of the film’s production was the amount of research necessary for the project. “Getting it off the ground and really dedicating time to the research was pretty daunting because it was just one of those things where you’re trying to make sure that if you’re doing a documentary, you want to make sure that it’s true. That’s what documentaries are all about,” said Cooper.
Cooper said that they have around another fifty hours of footage not in the short documentary, but he is looking to expand the documentary into a feature film in the future or potentially even do a series of “price of resistance” documentaries.
During the interview, Platania asked Cooper what it was like, as a black man, going to Mississippi, where so many atrocities had been committed in the sixties, to conduct interviews for the film. “Well, the trees look the same,” said Cooper. “Going down there, looking at the trees, I’m looking at the cotton fields. You know, I’ve been to the middle of a cotton field …. I’m looking at the cotton fields and I’m just thinking about my ancestors.”
