UPDATE: 6.17
From the bottom of our hearts we thank everyone who has contributed to this fundraiser!
As we have a few thousand left to raise I want to share what these last 2,000$ will make possible. We have at least six participants, all of whom are trans folks who have experienced incarceration on Rikers Island, but only a budget to pay 3-4 of them fairly for their creative work and engagement with the film. Our budget is also insufficient to cover the cost of production meals and transportation. This is essential when working long shoot days with folks who cannot afford the additional costs of trains, ubers, and eating out. Lastly, the remaining money left to fundraise will contribute to making animation possible and bringing this powerful story to life!
__________________________
Hi, I’m Rowan! I am a writer, community organizer, and filmmaker producing a 20 minute film on the struggle that incarcerated trans people have waged against the Rikers Island Jail Complex. Disappearing Island tells the story of trans resistance to Rikers Island as narrated by the land itself: a captive witness beneath a toxic landfill. Set against a fraught struggle to shut the violent jail down by 2027, this 20 minute film shares the poetry and testimonies of trans experiences on Rikers island, and animates the other worlds that trans prisoners have conceived both on and off the island. We need money to properly pay the participants in our film, cover audio equipment costs and be able to animate their testimonials. All participants are trans people who have endured the torture of Rikers Island. Most are in the thick of reentry, every dollar counts.
Disappearing Island is a community storytelling project borne out of relationships of care and mutual aid within the trans community and the struggle to shut down Rikers Island. Our approach is to engage the writing, lived experiences and unique creative outlets of our participants to craft testimonials which are held together through their relationships to the island itself and the historic legacy of trans struggle against Rikers Island. For example, one participant, a trans woman who was released from Marcy Correctional Institute in January, kept journal entries with letters to herself throughout her time on Rikers Island. Her testimonial will be made up of these journal entries as well as a soliloquy confronting the nature of the jail complex.
Disappearing Island seeks to capture the ways in which trans people overwrite their own desires onto their imposed reality, especially when forced to live in conditions that constantly deny their transition. Animation is how we allow our story to go beyond the dominant (gendered) reality of Rikers island as it is captured by the camera lens. We seek to tell the truth of how trans people see themselves as it is captured by animation.
We begin production this June and July at an urgent time for trans prisoner struggle. Since Trump’s signing of Executive Order 14168 on January 20th, all trans women have been directed into men’s facilities across federal prisons, and we have heard many reports of Riker's immediately following suit. Just this last sunday (5/25) Trump’s Department of Justice defunded the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center, one of the only limited and already underresourced supports for incarcerated trans people who are subject to extremely high rates of sexual abuse inside. Under Eric Adam’s New York Department Of Corrections leadership change, the LGBTQ liaison unit, the sole unit looking out for the hundreds of queer people on Rikers, halted their programming and lost power in crucial housing decisions. One member of the LGBTQ liaison unit shared several stories of trans women being repeatedly raped in men’s housing units, and not being moved for several weeks after reporting the assaults to Correctional Officers. Additionally, stories of Correctional Officers sexually assaulting women on Rikers island have been reported with no response for over a year. The sexual violence and daily indignities that unfold on Rikers Island are an intergral part of the jails objective to disappear those who are determined as criminal based on their gendered and racial status, ability to pay bail and abandonment from the state. Today, mainstream conversations around queer rights continue to ignore the 1 in 5 trans women and half of Black trans women who have experienced incarceration, but the legacy of trans struggle lives on against Rikers Island.
Our beautiful, entirely trans production team are comrades across various parts of the trans struggle and the movement to shut down Rikers Island. This film is dedicated to building trans power in the struggle to shut down rikers. It is a bridge for a modern queer movement that has left behind their prisoners and the struggle to shut down rikers which is at risk of recreating new jails that will subject trans people to the same crises across the city.
See our full proposal and production team bios linked here