Space to Breathe

Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, set in a future where there are no prisons or police.

Jordan Flaherty

2025

21 mins

Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history's archives on the movements of the early 21st Century.

Synopsis

Space to Breathe is a hybrid of science fiction and documentary. It is a documentary about today's movements to abolish prisons and police from the perspective of the utopian future we are creating. Documentary footage from today is intercut with future scripted scenes, using actors.

Sojourner (Sojo), a Black gender non-conforming youth in the year 2070, is making a documentary about how the work of today’s activists (in 2025) led to the end of prisons and police. The film is simultaneously about mass movements of people shaping change today (A documentary shot with real activists on the street) and a future world where today’s movements, demanding to defund the police and abolish prisons, have been successful.

Director Commentary

All organizing is science fiction. When organizers imagine a world without poverty, without war, without borders or prisons—that's science fiction. They're moving beyond the boundaries of what is possible or realistic, into the realm of what we are told is impossible. Being able to collectively dream those new worlds means that we can begin to create those new worlds here.