Acting Erratically

Acting Erratically is a term typically used by law enforcement when they believe they are encountering someone experiencing mental distress. This short film explores the connections between freedom of movement and state sanctioned violence in the lives of NYC-based women and gender-non-conforming people of color by critically engaging with the archive and using found footage as metaphorical architecture. A narrative of resistance is explored through the first person by Mecca, who re-appropriates the idea of Acting Erratically as a powerful and performative response to systemic oppression and police violence. This film was made collaboratively with members of Picture The Homeless and Black Youth Project 100 (NYC Chapter).

  • Tuff Guts
    Director
    Free the 23 (2014) - Activist Film Festival Melbourne, After the Apology (2017) - Perth International Film festival.
  • Hazel Katz
    Director
    Doctor Faustus (2011) - public television NYC, Skin (2017) - ICDOCS.
  • Daniel Goodman
    Director
    The Last Villagers (2011) - Hangzhou International Film Festival,
  • Picture the Homeless
    Writer
  • Black Youth Project 100 (NYC Chapter)
    Writer
  • Nikita Price
    Producer
  • Christopher Paul Harris
    Producer
  • Rebekah Dais
    Key Cast
    "Mecca"
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    African American, Police, Essay
  • Runtime:
    15 minutes 8 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 28, 2018
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    HD and found footage
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Distribution Information
  • UnionDocs
    Country: United States
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Tuff Guts, Hazel Katz, Daniel Goodman

Tuff Guts (UnionDocs Colab)
Tuff Guts, also known as Karoline Morwitzer, likes to agitate, contemplate, and relate. Her documentary work is a fusion of media activism and process focused art making. She has a strong community arts practice and has supported and collaborated on a number of bottom-up grassroots projects, campaigns, and organizations through film. She completed a BA in Art History from the University of Sydney and Honors in Media Arts at RMIT University in Melbourne. In 2017 she completed a year long fellowship as part of UnionDocs Collaborative Studio in NYC. Tuff’s work sits online, in campaigns, in galleries, in festivals, between individuals, at community events, and projected on walls both outside and inside.

Hazel Katz (UnionDocs Colab)
A video artist based in New York, Hazel received their BA from Oberlin College and is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College. They recently completed a year long collaborative residency at UnionDocs. They’ve produced a number of short experimental videos composed of found footage and smartphone archives. Hazel’s video Doctor Faustus was shown on public television in New York in 2011 and their short Skin premiered at ICDOCS in 2017. Hazel produces videos in collaboration with local activist groups around gentrification and police violence and they currently volunteer with a parole justice organization supporting incarcerated people. They are currently wrapping up their first feature documentary about the last remaining union-run retirement community in the US.

Daniel Goodman (UnionDocs Colab)
A New Jersey-native now based in Brooklyn, Daniel Goodman is a street photographer, multimedia journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Daniel holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Degree in Journalism from The University of Hong Kong. Through his work he explores identity, culture and cultural representation, and personal narratives. His first documentary short film The Last Villagers, explored life in a small Hong Kong fishing village and screened at the Hangzhou International Film Festival in 2011.

Nikita Price (Picture The Homeless, NYC)
A long time Civil Rights Organizer at Picture the Homeless (PTH), Nikita Price’s campaign work focuses on selective police enforcement and the Broken Windows Theory as it applies to the Homeless and the poor in New York. While navigating the NYC shelter system, Nikita joined Picture the Homeless in 2006 volunteering as a member and was one of the first members to be enrolled in the Homeless Organizing Academy (HOA). This lead him to be a primary organizer for their shelter campaign and around rental subsidies. After a period of absence Nikita became part of the staff for the HOA, and in 2014 filled the Civil Rights Organizer position. He is presently raising two lovely daughters and is passionate in his role as both single father and organizer, both within PTH and as a steering committee member of Communities United for Police Reform.

Christopher Paul Harris (Black Youth Project 100 (NYC Chapter))
Christopher Paul Harris is an organizer in the NYC chapter of the Black Youth Project 100, and is a PhD candidate in Politics and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Political Acts, Generational Minds: Race, Culture and the Politics of the Wake," explores the way young black activists confront (their) blackness by putting the political ideas and culture practices in and around the Movement for Black Lives in conversation with black critical thought. Along with his research and activism, Christopher is a 2016-2017 Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, where he has co-curated the case study "Racial Justice Today: The Movement for Black Lives 2012-2017" as part of the ongoing exhibition Activist New York.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The original concept for this film was developed through long conversations with Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), who emerged emerged from the #BLM movement. Crucial to this collaboration is the black queer feminist lens, which provided a way for us to focus our attention on those most marginalized within the black community - women, trans gender nonconforming (TGNC) people, and in this case those who also identify as neurodivergent. We discovered the term Acting Erratically while researching media databases associated with lethal police violence against individuals reported as having a mental health crisis. The term became a window for us to examine how police and institutions interact with these communities and provoked us to interrogate the power and significance of this term and its implication for the black community and the #BLM movement.

We, as uniformly white filmmakers, were encouraged by BYP100 to understand traditions employed around the documentation and archiving of black bodies historically. Our re-appropriation of found archives from youtube became a way for us to reverse archive the trauma of black bodies, or in our case, the experience of oppression by others, and instead think of new ways to articulate this violence without replicating it.

It was crucial for us to pursue an additional collaboration with people who had direct experience of police violence at the intersection of mental health. This led us to the incredibly important work of Picture The Homeless (PTH), who work tirelessly to challenge myths around homelessness and push back against structural oppression within housing which disproportionately affects people of color in NYC. We partnered with their Civil Rights department through Nikita Price whose work directly deals with racialized policing, stigma around mental health and one's housing status. He introduced us to a number of members interested to perform or be interviewed as part of the work.

Making work around mental health also resonated with some of us in terms of our own experience. Davey, one co-director, spent a period of time in a psychiatric hospital and from that had a particular interest in exploring the role chemical restraint played as a mode of coercion and control. For the purposes of this film, our inquiry led us to focus on the experience of black communities and ‘protest psychosis’ or the pathologization of freedom seeking bodies.

The issues addressed in Acting Erratically are deeply relevant. Hugh Barry, the police officer who murdered Deborah Danner on October 18th 2016, walked free on February 15th 2018, like every cop before him faced with the inadequate mechanisms of justice in the USA. We hope this film can contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding police accountability, deepen awareness around the relationship between mental health and criminalized movement for black women and TGNC people, as well as adding a new visual language to explore police violence as allies and media makers.

Short video about intentions and process behind Acting Erratically from collaborators -
9.46 mins
https://vimeo.com/227565248
password: folks