experiences were co-opted through the lens of somebody else, be it political or social,” she says. Working as the director of the film and as an on-camera subject was challenging, RussoYoung says. In addition to her mothers and sister, the film features new and archival interviews with friends of her family and those of Steel, who died of AIDS in 1998. Mitigating these tensions while retaining a sense of objectivity during interviews took practice and patience. “I didn’t want to injure anybody more than they had already been damaged in the process of the story itself,” she says. “I had to remind myself, ‘just listen, be open, and try to not judge as it’s happening, but to hear it.’ “It took a lot of energy on my part to refuse to go to a place that I would automatically go to. The movie was all about tracking my arc of subjectivity.” While talking about the details of the lawsuit was difficult, the experience was “completely riveting as a filmmaker,” she says—one that will inspire how she approaches her work in the future, whether in narrative filmmaking or documentary. “Life is really short, and I want to make work that reflects who I am and what I believe in.” Russo-Young credits her time at Oberlin as formative in cultivating her identity and beliefs as an artist, “a great time for me to start practicing what I wanted to do.” She participated in “a little bit of everything,” including a film project that explored her custody case through a retelling of the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, featured briefly in Nuclear Family. “That was my first exploration of this entire narrative, and that was done at Oberlin in the art building as a performance,” she says. “It was two nights, all of my Oberlin friends came, and it was an independent project that I did, I think for Winter Term.” She views college as a time to produce “bad work” as part of the learning process. “You don’t get to do better work until you do bad work. That’s what I was doing—but it wasn’t bad, it was just young.” And while her colleagues in the film industry come from all walks of life, “what unites those experiences is continuing to try things out and do the work in all different ways and all kinds of environments. “That’s what’s so great about Oberlin specifically—it allows you to try a bunch of different experiences, crafts, and creative endeavors and then see what you like and respond to it.” OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2022 SPRING
POEM
Black Heroism is Unskilled Labor BY XAN PHILLIPS ’14
Angela makes sure the right people die at the funeral. A grandchild of the Tulsa Massacre, her skin is artifice, a call to dream so nothing occurs. When her yt colleague detonates a suicide bomber she blocks the blast with a casket. It is common knowledge that womanism does feminism’s housekeeping. Much as one might travel, one guilt-trips. In this case, to Re-Reconstruction Era fantasy. Did I mention that everyone is a cop, and still someone is trying to tell a story about justice. Quiet as it’s kept, take something from the blackbox and a little black ekes out further into the ethos, but these stories don’t need to matter; they’re made from it. I find no proxy here in iconography, genomes ache. “Okonkwo hangs himself in the end” says Angela, spoiling the final pages of Things Fall Apart. “Angela won’t die at the end,” I say, to spoil another thing. Copyright © 2021 by Xan Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 25, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets. Xan Phillips is the author of Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019). “This poem is part of a larger ekphrastic project called Spectacle. ‘Black Heroism is Unskilled Labor’ is written about [the television show] Watchmen’s Angela Abar,” says Phillips. 11