“It’s hopefully a film that is outlining a development of something that is instructive, to understand as a narrative that was once public, but it’s not sort of a popular history as we understand it,” said director Sierra Pettengill.

Pettengill’s documentary Riotsville, USA examines footage from the media and government in the 1960s as the state created model towns where military and police were trained to respond to civil disorder. The documentary reconciles communities most affected by state violence, activism and organizations that oppose it, its ongoing effects, and the surrounding narratives. An important element to note is the time period of the rebellions, taking place during “war in Vietnam, substandard living conditions for people of color, and a larger shift in consciousness [that] all contributed to people wielding violence as a tool of protest,” as per The New York Times.

“We are on what seems like a loop in the country,” said Pettengill, “sort of determined to not learn the same lessons over and over again. I think the role, the narratives about who we are as a country, and what stood in the way of making real material differences in people’s lives is stuck in a loop. Watching a state be forced to sort of base crisis and make decisions which allocate tremendous and unprecedented amounts of money towards police repression, that feels like a very important thing to reckon with how it’s constructed.”

Researching Riotsville, USA

Footage used in Riotsville, USA comes from the archives of media and government, of which leaned directly into Pettengill’s profession as an archival researcher.

“I’m an archival researcher by profession, so it was a pretty holistic process. I decided a few years in, during the edit process, that we were going to only limit ourselves to military and broadcast television. But you know, it’s following the citations of books, I read a lot of newspapers especially, trying to figure out what was happening… taking whatever secondary sources exist and meeting all their references. We’re talking to the archivist who have a really deep knowledge of what their collections contain, and working together over time with them,” said Pettengill.

Which surely came with its challenges, especially as production took place during the pandemic. “Something that was very difficult was during the pandemic, people were like, ‘Oh, great. Now we can just make archival films,’ as though the archives aren’t also in physical places. There’s a lot of research you can do remotely, but it was a really stark difference for me to not be able to go in person and work with sort of the experts in their collections. I also always find that when you find a piece of archival material, whatever sitting around it or how it has been labeled, whatever else you find along the way of looking for something else, is also a really important part of a research process for me. And so that was a difficult thing to have sorted,” explained Pettengill.

Related: Exclusive: Director Biana Stigter Discusses Preserving History in Three Minutes: A Lengthening

Societal Structures on a Loop

Riotsville2
Magnolia Pictures

“I think working on this film made me pretty committed to abolitionist ideals. I think the process of understanding that what I’m looking at in Riotsville, is what they thought of as police reform in 1968, and what reform looks like, which is often just an allocation of money. That’s what Riotsville is. This was an attempt to make policing better, and I think that is a really limited and disruptive idea, which just increases and increases police presence. And so, understanding how to look at, and understand where the money is going, and the impact of these strip takedown programs into communities, I think I got a much broader and in depth view of how these systems kind of work and what the solutions are,” commented Pettengill when asked how the making of Riotsville, USA reinforced or changed her perspective.

She continued, ending the interview noting that one of the messages she hopes for viewers to take away from watching her documentary is that “we should defund the police, and that this world we live in is not out of our control to shape. The way that we are sort of repeating the same social structures over and over again on a loop should hopefully inform that it can and should be stopped.”

Magnolia Pictures will release Riotsville, USA in theaters on September 16, 2022.