Experiencing Interruptions?

DRY BONES

DRY BONES tells the gripping and emotional tale of Ike Maxwell, a legendary Black football player from the 1970s whose life is upended when his brother is tragically shot and killed by a white police officer in Elyria, Ohio—a city long plagued by racial tension. The incident thrusts Ike into a world of unrelenting hardship, grief, and trauma, compounded by the physical toll of brain injuries sustained over the years.
Sherman Jones, a passionate local community organizer, draws a poignant parallel between Ike's story and the biblical tale of Ezekiel's dry bones. "How are we going to breathe life into those dry bones?" Jones asks in the film. This question resonates not only for Ike but for the entire city of Elyria.
Imbued with religious undertones, the film presents football as a near-sacred experience for Black Elyrians who once revered Ike Maxwell as their hero. A central question then emerges: how do you revive a fallen hero? The answer lies in the power of community. DRY BONES showcases communal strength, offering a moving testament to the enduring omnipotence of a relatively obscure Black community in the heart of a rust belt city in Ohio.

  • Tara Conley
    Director
  • Tara Lynn Conley
    Producer
  • Sean Arnold
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 5 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    February 1, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    30,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Tara Conley

Tara L. Conley is an interdisciplinary scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her work bridges media studies, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and ethnographic documentary-making, with a longstanding commitment to highlighting underrepresented American stories of Black life in regions like the Gulf Coast and Rust Belt.

DRY BONES, Tara’s first feature-length documentary, returns her to her roots in Ohio to explore the life of Ike Maxwell—Elyria’s once-celebrated football star whose ascent was halted by tragedy—and the enduring community that refused to let his story fade. Through informed storytelling, evocative archival visuals, and an electrifying soundtrack rooted in Cleveland’s Boodie Recording legacy, the film offers a poignant meditation on memory, resilience, and the unfinished stories of Rust Belt America.

Tara brings a depth of scholarly and creative distinction to her films, grounded in a rich background in educational practice and digital media innovation. She earned her Ed.D. in Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2016, after completing an M.A. in Women’s Studies at Texas Woman’s University and a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) in English at the University of Houston.
Beyond filmmaking, Tara’s impact spans academia and cultural production:

She founded Hashtag Feminism (2013–2015), a pioneering digital archive of feminist discourse emerging from Twitter.

Her short documentary Brackish (2015), centered on post-Katrina New Orleans, exemplifies her immersive, ethnographic visual storytelling.

She was awarded the prestigious Race and Technology Practitioner Fellowship at Stanford University (2021–22), where she developed a digital toolkit to advance racial justice education.

Tara’s scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as Feminist Media Studies, The Black Scholar Journal, Social Media + Society, and MIT Press, and she currently contributes to the Rust Belt Studies editorial board.

For more visit: https://taralconley.org/ and https://drybonesfilm.com/

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I began DRY BONES with a simple yet urgent question: What happens when the stories of Black life in small Rust Belt towns are left untold?

Growing up in northeast Ohio, I knew the names of athletes and local heroes who brought pride to our communities, but I also witnessed how quickly their lives and legacies could be overshadowed by tragedy, silence, or erasure. When I returned home as a filmmaker and scholar, I was drawn to the story of Ike Maxwell, a football star whose promise was derailed by the killing of his younger brother and the three-day uprising that followed in Elyria in 1975.

This film is both a personal journey and a collective act of remembrance. It documents Ike’s resilience while confronting the institutional and spatial violence that shaped the Rust Belt and the people who endured it. By weaving together archival footage, community voices, and experimental visuals—including miniature models and soundscapes rooted in Cleveland’s Boodie Recording legacy—I wanted to create not just a historical record but a meditation on memory, loss, and the unfinished work of justice.

As a Black feminist media scholar, my practice insists on centering the voices and geographies too often neglected in mainstream narratives. DRY BONES is my way of returning home to listen more deeply, to sit with contradictions, and to honor the lives of those whose stories still reverberate.

I hope audiences leave this film with a sense of the weight of history carried in local communities, and also with a renewed belief in the possibilities of storytelling to heal, to resist erasure, and to remind us that even broken bones can carry life.

— Tara L. Conley
Director, DRY BONES