Hopewell
2016 · 3m
Directed by Lorena Manríquez
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark
Only 6 days prior to the US election, Hopewell Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi was burned and vandalized with “Vote Trump” graffiti.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects rage here, or at least catharsis—Manríquez gives you neither, just the weight of a space and a question mark where your anger goes. It's the refusal to perform outrage that makes it actually unsettling.
A formally restrained document of trauma that locates itself in a long lineage of bearing witness—the 3-minute constraint becomes a curatorial choice, each compositional decision honoring the gravity of what's being held rather than exploited.
The decision to let silence and architectural space do the interpretive work instead of voiceover or interviews—that restraint is what transforms a news story into something that lives in the body rather than the argument.