Homegrown

I never thought I’d make a movie in the U.S. where I’d witness political rivals fist-fighting in the streets, and film a protagonist through hours of hand-to-hand combat at the US Capitol. All films are emotional for their makers, but this one has been particularly affecting as a Black filmmaker without the privilege to turn away.

Polite society would have us believe that violence is a fringe or extreme(ist) aberration; an anomaly, not the norm. But the very concepts of race and class were forged with violence. And it was political violence that united thirteen colonies into American states, while divisions defined its patchwork assembly.

Over the last two decades, I have participated in and documented many types of social movements.This experience inspired me to explore what the interconnected stories that build movements tell us about power and society. So, I set out to investigate how homegrown political violence is justified and normalized, particularly by a growing movement of everyday people losing faith in American democracy’s ability to protect their interests.

Homegrown is a unique portrait of an American social movement that has demonstrated it is willing to use violence to fight for what they believe America should be. This movement self-identifies as the Patriot Movement. It emerged in the 1980s as the militant wing of the Republican Party. Today it is the dominant force animating American Conservatism. It is mostly characterized as an electoral phenomenon unique to Donald Trump. MAGA, as it’s called. But it is a mass-movement comprised of people across lines of race, class, geography, and other demographics, that existed long before him. And it will outlast him.

Three factors distinguish Homegrown from any other film on the topic: The journalistic rigor situating the story in America’s historical legacy of conflict, it’s cinéma vérité approach, and its unprecedented access to people who became eager perpetrators of contemporary political violence. Homegrown is the only film, that I know of, that captured these unprecedented events from the passenger seat, as they unfolded. No other nonfiction film offers such a “nuanced and profound” (El Pais) look at America from the point-of-view of people seduced by the allure of authoritarianism. In the process Homegrown reveals how democracy fractures not in the shadows, but in familiar spaces — by ordinary people searching for meaning in an unstable world.

If we were reporting on a foreign country, we would characterize events that happened over the course of filming - like people discharging weapons at their political rivals, or using improvised explosive devices - as sectarian violence. Because that’s what it is.

There is a simmering conflict in America that is boiling over. What’s even harder to grasp is the fact that violence won’t always be motivated by political ideologies. It will be more like violent outbursts of nihilistic rage settling scores that don’t clearly map across the partisan poles that defined the last century.

The notion that “it can’t happen here” runs so deep in the American psyche that the signs can be missed. In a prescient moment of clarity one of Homegrown’s protagonists says, “it’s not gonna be this giant civil war that people are talking about. Look at Ireland, that’s what it’s gonna be.”

We set out to make an honest, no judgment, study of the people heeding the clarion call of us vs them politics. What we achieved is a visceral cinematic contribution to the discussion on the future of democracy. Homegrown is at once a unique record of a transformative moment in U.S. history, and an urgent sign of those to come.