09/07/2026
A City Within a City Documentary Film: What the Showings Have Revealed 🎥🎬🎞️
Our three public presentations for feedback this year for the assembly of the A City Within a City Documentary Film—February 20, 2026, August 28 and August 29, 2026—have produced some important patterns worth examining.
To be clear: there are so many stories of The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan that no one single film could possibly contain them all. Either way, the reaction from many of the attendees often have been: “Where is my story?” “Why isn't this person here?” “Why didn't you tell this?” On one level, that’s really frustrating and kinda sad to hear. But underneath that response is something much more profound and extremely telling. It demonstrates how historically deprived people become highly sensitive to representation or lack-thereof. People want to see themselves and be seen. To be heard.
This is where GRMiFi's larger mission becomes important. A City Within a City should never be viewed simply as a “finished film”. This film is establishing infrastructure for a larger narrative and iconography movement and has already demonstrated something powerful: There is an audience. There is an abundance of stories. There is deep emotional investment. And there is a serious need for greater Black participation in the telling, witnessing and ownership of the narratives and stories about Grand Rapids. And this is the larger lesson for the A City Within a City Documentary Film. Tell more stories!
This abundance of stories itself creates a challenge and this is one of the most important conversations that this film is initiating. When your community has spent generations watching other people tell the story, and control the history and outcomes—often selectively or incompletely—and certainly to their own advantage, the absence of your particular story can feel like another act of erasure.
The attendance pattern and feedback consumed across the film’s three showings is equally significant. If 70% or more of the combined audience is white, then the larger question becomes: who currently has the appetite, interest, access, resources, and the willingness to digest, understand and recognize the stories of Grand Rapids' Black history? This distinction matters.
This is precisely why this film and the subsequent series of ongoing stories are critically important: to create the conditions where all communities have the agency, infrastructure, resources, confidence and collective capacity to tell, preserve, distribute and own their stories.
The mission of is to work with our community partners to build an ecosystem of owners, creators, producers, archivists, audiences and beneficiaries of the stories we tell.
The next phase of this work is and our plan to market and distribute our stories…beginning with “A City Within a City” Documentary Film (Part 1) and to grow forward with an ecosystem capable of producing, curating, holding and promoting the next 90 films, 900 oral histories, 9,000 photographs, books, podcasts, documentaries, archives and digital stories.
There’s more, there’s always gonna be more!
