Minda Martin

©2020 HDCam/Mixed Media, Black & White, Color, 31min

This is an edited version of the feature essay documentary Ramps to Nowhere (2019) made for educational purposes and to be freely accessed through the UW Special Collections (link to the film is coming soon).

Brief Synopsis

In the 1950s, the plan for Seattle was to build the densest network of freeways in the world. It would have displaced thousands, especially the poor and people of color. Over the next two decades a broad-based coalition of communities came together and stopped a majority of freeways going through their city. Testimonies from 50 years ago are juxtaposed with interviews of the activists who participated in the freeway revolt giving a picture of what Seattle could have been had the people not stood up to the Highway Lobby and their representatives.

13min clr/snd Mixed Media. ©2015

Made for and with eastern Cuban audiences during my travel to Eastern Cuba to share my work in small communities as part of the program Closing Distances/Cerrando Distancias by America’s Media Initiative. There I screened two of my films about American poverty, displacement, and racial and gender inequities in America--Free Land and Mother’s Heritage. During this tour, I engaged in spirited Q&A sessions with Cuban audiences in the towns of Bayamo, San Pablo de Yao, Guantanamo, and Baracoa. The intimate spaces and conversations about and with those films were conducted inside people’s homes, backyards, and cinemas built in the 1950s. Cuba, Cine Adentro (2015) is the film I made for the Cubans I had met to reflect back my experience of our exchange.

3.5minutes, Super8mm, ©2003

11minutes, Analog Video, Super8mm ©1996