CWC Docs: What These Walls Won’t Hold

Adamu Chan is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area who started filmmaking while incarcerated within San Quentin State Prison. He produced numerous short films while incarcerated, using his experience and vantage point to focus on issues related to social justice. In 2021, he was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films and was tapped to produce and direct What These Walls Won’t Hold. The film won Best Mid-Length Documentary at the 2023 San Francisco International Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on PBS/America ReFramed. In 2022, Adamu directed a documentary short for the doc-series Bridge Builders about Ny Nourn, a community member working at the intersections of immigration, incarceration, and gender justice. He is also a 2022 Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Mellon Arts Fellow, a 2023 Rockwood Institute Documentary Leaders Fellow, and a 2024 SFFILM House resident.

Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB. Currently, she is revising her monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, which analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also developing a Bert Williams essay film, Nobody: In Search of Bert Williams and the Emergence of Global Black Cultural Production (fiscal sponsor: Aubin Pictures), and conducting research on the relationship between Vandenberg Space Force Base and the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, as Co-Primary Investigator of The Satellite Coast project (with PI Lisa Parks, UCSB, and Co-PI Carlos Jimenez Jr., University of Denver).