Marquise: So welcome to Sweet Flypaper. My name is Marquise Stillwell.

Neil: And I am Neil Ramsay.

Marquise: I am so excited about the next guest. Friend collaborator, someone that I look up to, and so excited about the work that she is doing. None other than dream hampton.

Neil: How did you come across dream?

Marquise: Dream and I initially came across because she was helping my business partner on the film side, Petter Ringbom, with the Russian winter that starred John Forté. And so when John was released, came back out, he decided to go to Russia. One of his old high school classmates brought him over and he was kind of kicking off his music career. And dream was part of the team that helped him. Then we opened up at the Tribeca Film Festival and we've been friends. And then I crossed paths. And we have so many shared friends.

Neil: Indeed, I remember reading her profile from Time Magazine. 2019 Most Influential People in the World by Tarana Burke.

Marquise: Have you guys crossed paths?

Neil: No, no.

Marquise: She's been very much head down and working and producing over the last couple of years. I mean, dream is, you know, she's an award winning writer and filmmaker out of Detroit. And the Emmy nominated Surviving R. Kelly earned a Peabody Award focus on black and brown stories and advocating for social justice.

Neil: Definitely a power organizer.

Marquise: Yes. The conversation with dream, what I really enjoyed, was moving away from, say, some of the traditional black leaders. And I love the way that she really challenges us to think about, you know, some of those leaders who are very fundamentally a part of the community and really tackling the issues on a day to day basis without being tied up in the political machine.

Neil: I'm looking forward to this conversation to go out because out there lies an art form in and of itself. And being able to separate or being able to exist and do those sorts of things without being tied up in that is a testament to her strength and clarity and about designing the way she organizes and moves it forward. So that's something I'm very much interested in listening to and hearing.

Marquise: dream, Hello! [dream: hello!] Good to connect with you. Thank you so much for taking time out to talk with me.

Dream: ​Of course, thank you for inviting me.

Marquise: ​I love your work, and I love your voice, and we're going to talk a little bit about that, but you and I both are from the Midwest, I'm from Ohio originally, just maybe two or three hours South of you. And growing up in the Midwest, and then both of us spending time inNew York, I'm currently in New York City, and I know that you spend a lot of time here. Give me a sense of what does it mean to be in the Midwest right now, with everything that's happening? I was just in Detroit a week ago.

Dream: ​Um, I don't know that space and location mean anything anymore. I'm not inDetroit anymore. I was for the entirety of the lockdown. I am still basically operating as if I'm in a lockdown, so I think that our worlds just got smaller. Particularly for those of us who have opted out of social media in this moment, which I have done...our worlds became our homes. You know, sometimes I say Detroit is, whatever I used to say about Detroit, like a Black nation. Now I'm talking about my disappearing Black city. But it's not like I was seeing it or anyone during COVID. There are times when I'm reminded that ​, and militias come out, and all of the things that I fear, you know, are going to be a national question soon.

So I don't know. I mean, I have lots to say about Detroit. I'm trying to write about it. I'm making a film, an experimental doc about flooded basements, swollen lakes, fading memories, and my disappearing Black city. It’s called ​Freshwater​.

Marquise: ​Oh, wow, wow. I'd love to dive into that as well. Yeah, Detroit... I mean, it's interesting because growing up in similar areas where, for me, I'm sure similar to you, I feel like, Idid grow up in a very Black-centric, you know, where the stores and the people around me, I could see my face...And I think we're living at a time where we don't see ourselves in the changes that are happening in our cities.

Dream: ​Yeah, for sure. What city are you from, Columbus?

Marquise: I’m from Mansfield. Mansfield, Ohio.

Dream: And is Mansfield experiencing gentrification? Like Columbus?

Marquise: ​We had a large GM plant there, we had a steel mill there. And so when I was growing up, it was a pretty vibrant town and city.

We had one of the largest skating rinks in the area, so people from Detroit used to come down and go skating because our skating rink was so big and, you know, had the battles of the DJs back and forth through the seventies, eighties, and nineties. And then it disappeared with everything had happened with the car industry and the steel industry, and so we're not seeing so much gentrification as we're just seeing blighted neighborhoods and jobs being lost.

Certain areas are still okay and strong, but those other areas are really lost. And so, yeah, we’re disappearing and it's really sad. And speaking of some of those changes, you know, we lost John Lewis and CT Vivian the last couple of weeks. How do you see the legacy of a lot of our Black leaders? And what is your insight on that? Do you see that there's a passing of the torch? What are some of those things that we need to think about the next generation of activism?

Dream: Well, I don't think there's some direct line between the Civil Rights Movement and say, this generation of activism. I am from a generation that very much looked to the BlackPower Movement, so I never had... I'm not interested in leadership in any traditional way, and haven’t been for a long time... or leaders. I divested myself from that set myself from that notion, I don't know, probably when Michael Jackson started bleaching his skin.. He was probably the only celebrity that I like, idolized, from about the age of, I dunno, 10 to 14.

So after that, I was pretty much over celebrities, and it probably took me a little bit longer to divest from this kind of... yeah, it would be fair to say worship... that I had at Malcolm X and that probably would have been at 25. So I am nearly twice that now, fully frigging grown, and I've known way too many celebrities to be impressed by celebrity.

It's not that interesting to me. It's unfortunate when your talent propels you into visibility. I have friends who like, you know, played with that idea. My friend ​Invincible​, who is the greatest living rapper did whole performances from behind basically a screen where they weren't even seen, sot hat was an interesting way to negotiate this concept of talent and visibility. But people who aren't, whose talent doesn't require, they like being on stage...I have no idea where they would choose it.

So, John Lewis, I'm not that familiar with his legacy. I think that his age was a really great age to live to. And watching and learning about ​CT Vivian​ as the kind of memorials are coming in... for me, like losing someone like ​Chokwe Lumumba​ just as he was unveiling his economic plan forJackson, Mississippi.

I actually learned about that when I was at UofM; I was giving a talk on a film about Angela Davis.So this actually connects to your question. Like these ones, the people who Chokwe Lumumbawas a mentor to—he started the organization that I was a cofounder of the New York chapter of, which was the ​Malcolm X Grassroots Movement​.

It was the grassroots organization to a larger organization called NAPO, which I was not a part of—​New Afrikan People’s Organization​. And I was a part of the grassroots org. And up until that organization couldn't pass an anti-homophobia principle, it was my organizing home. And so those were my—​Sekou Odinga​ worked on his defense fund when he was in prison and then he came home, of course he's a political prisoner in jail, partly for the liberation of Assata Shakur. He was ​Black Liberation Army​. So none of these people are Civil Rights Movement. There's this huge kind of way that people talk about, that is wrong, I think—that people talk about, kind of movement genealogy—and it does two things: one, it erases the ​Black Power Movement​, which of course began in earnest with Malcolm, but was named so after Malcolm's assassination. So you have people like ​Kwame Ture ​(Stokley Carmichael) and ​SNCC​ and the Black Panther Party explicitly saying that they are going to move Malcolm's legacy forward. Right. And then once theBlack Panther party has its short-lived, comparatively, moment in history, there's a radical and militant kind of arm that Springs out of that, not in like, you know, what Nelson Mandela was apart of in the ​ANC​, which is the ​BLA​, The Black Liberation Army. So those folks, those BLA people ended up being my mentors, and then I'm Gen X which is another generation that gets erased a lot.

So all the activism that was happening in the ‘90s when we weren’t hyper-documenting, and that's not a criticism to call it hyper-documentation, I mean, as annoying as social media can be, as challenging as it can be, it is also this space where there's an enormous amount of documentation happening, so that generations 40 years from now who may be involved in whatever they're doing—movement mapping–they will have all of this information available. And that wasn't necessarily true in the ‘70s, the ‘80s ​Mutulu​ Shakur​ and ​Sekou Odinga​, these people got arrested in the ‘80s. So the ‘80s and ‘90s it's like this gaping hole, you know, so I don't know what to say about John Lewis. I'm sorry that he's gone. I'm glad he lived as long as he did.

Marquise: ​​I think there's a transferring of legacy. You know, I spoke with my dad about this and he was, you know, thinking about the difference between the movement and the man and a difference between organizations and leadership, because I agree with you. I think in too many ways, we’ve fallen victim to trying to follow a leader and not self-evolving through the movement, meaning that we're taking it on. We're taking responsibility for what we provide.

Dream: ​I'm saying that the Civil RightsMovement was a movement. After the Civil Rights Movement came the Black Power Movement.[Marquise: Right.] I'm also saying that there is no Civil Rights Movement to like a movement that begins around the time that Oscar Grant is killed.​​ Once you become apart of the electoral system, which I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I mean, people, the BlackPanther Party experimented with that, my mentor Chokwe Lumumba became an elected official.

After a lot of conversation within his organization, and some that trickled down to the grassroots organizations that I was part of, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, but absolutely had long conversations and debating whether or not Chokwe should even run for mayor right before he ran for mayor.

So, but once you become a part of the electoral system at that level, that John Lewis works, particularly on a national level, a federal employee, then that's not “movement” anymore. You become a part of the Democratic Party. [Marquise: Got it.] And I don't believe that that'sMovement work anymore. I think of it as separate. I think that it's unnecessary. I'm too old to be a movement politics who says, fuck electoral politics. I know how much electoral politics affects our everyday folks.

Marquise: I guess the way I'm also going with this is understanding how we hold people accountable. I think that your voice particularly, ​and​ your film work and your writing, has always been holding people accountable and making sure that victims have a voice, and making sure that the balance of the conversation isn't always about—at least from what I've seen—glorifying, or making the person that is quote “the victim,” the person who is a perpetrator, actually starts to become that of a victim... and the victim, the true victim that has been affected is lost in the narrative.

And when it comes to leadership, my followup question is how do we hold our leaders accountable? What does that mean as we're transitioning, whether you're working for the government and the federal side, or you are on the movement side and the leaders? Well, how do we hold them accountable?

Dream: I don’t—and I don't mean to be in conflict with you, like during this interview—you're just trying to ask simple questions, but I don't...I'm not sure that the framework is like... first of all, I don’t describe my work that way, you know? I don't think that I'm someone who holds people accountable and who gives voice to the voiceless.

Marquise: Right.

Dream: Yeah. So, I mean, and it’s okay. That's a wonderful thing to do...

Marquise: Tell me how you would describe your work.

Dream: ​Well, I think that I have spent a lot of time looking at Black women, you know, and I'm interested in Black women's stories. ​Arundhati Roy​ has a great quote​​around the voice thing she said, “there's really no such thing as the voiceless, there are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”

And so, I don't think that any, it's just like giving someone their dignity, people have ​voice​ and they'll sit in their communities, their households, hopefully. I mean their heads even, right. But the preferably unheard and that deliberately silenced is what I try to push back up against, you know? And that's such as with my work, with my very being, you know, like I know that there's a world that would rather not have complicated Black women out here being heard, you know? And complicated can be problematic. You know what I mean? I'm also like, how do I hold myself accountable? This question of holding people accountable is a construct that I'm also struggling with, I think that there needs to be more tools to resolve conflict. You know?

Marquise: Right. But I think that your work, I mean, just in seeing your work and being around you, I think that you do have a presence where people think about language. People think about how they want to express themselves, whether it's directly with you or through your work. Right? And so I think that whether you would describe yourself as holding people accountable, I think that the work that you do, and even the way that I respond to you, where I check my language. I think about my language. I hold myself accountable through that.

Dream: ​Mhm, well, that's not fun.

Marquise: It’s good. Because I think many of us, you know, I grew up in the Midwest. I have a, you know, my dad's a minister and my dad happens to be gay. And we've talked about, you know, I've seen within the work that you do in regards to speaking for those voices, and there are times I've been in situations where people will make comments, particularly in the Black community about gay people. And once people find out that my father is gay, they do their best to change their language. And it's not me directly trying to hold them accountable, but it's me calling them out: I don't play that.

We have to hold everyone accountable regardless of how you grew up. And I guess what I'm asking, you're saying that that's not intentional in your work.

Dream: ​Yeah. And I'm still saying that I don't give voice to people, but yeah, I certainly am someone who's probably checked more often than I'm checking people. You know, I'm someone that still struggles, I like, I mis-gender particularly my non-binary friends. Like, you know,I'll mess up sometimes.​

Yeah. And they've checked me. They've been like, listen, don’t pull me to the side...one of the best instructions or like, kind of pieces of advice I got around that was, don't come to me and apologize in private for something that you did in public, which is an ethic period, right, that I do believe in, and so like, if I say it, if I misgender someone in front of people, then the work is to say,Oh, I'm so sorry. You know, also to ask people their pronouns and along the way, I've learned that it's not your preferred pronouns, it’s your pronouns.

Marquise: Right, right.

Dream: The thing. So I'm not like someone I'm generation X and we can be obviously, as you can see about the cis men from my generation Neanderthals around gender, you know, and by the way, so my mentor’s generation, the folks that I was talking about—Black Panther,Black Power Generation, they too were incredibly repressive, incredibly patriarchal. So, I often need a lot of grace and I hope to extend it, you know?

Marquise: ​So when you go into projects—we're both filmmakers—and when you're going into a project, do you think about how you want people to feel after they see a project or is it just up to that person on how they respond?

Dream: You know, the cinephile in me really resents that kind of filmmaker.

I know that the most watched thing that I've ever done, ​Surviving R. Kelly​ is very like, directional around feelings... in terms of where the music cues, when women are crying on camera, like that is very much what I actually resented about, say Spielberg. You know what I mean? Or like between just Spielberg and Kubrick, I'm absolutely a Kubrick person, right? Yeah. I was a hugeTerrence Malick fan, like ​Days of Heaven​ was like a film that I watched dozens of times growing up, it's the only film where I think voiceover works, period. So I don't believe in like, trying to make people feel the way I believe, I’m trying to do the best work I can on my end. And then it's out in the world. I know that people have intentions like that and they set intentions, and I'm not saying it's wrong,

Marquise: ​But it's complicated. It's complicated​.

Dream: Right? Well, the Prince was like, I want this song to make you feel like having sex or want you to have this song to make you feel like you're at a party, I get the setting of intentions.

Marquise: I think that it's really tough because people want it to ask those basic questions, so tell me about your filmmaking process as if the process as if the process is trying to get someone to feel a certain way versus you just trying to tell the best story. I guess, again, going back to this idea of language within storytelling, how do you work that when it comes to dialogue with documentaries, because you're not putting words in people's mouthlike a narrative, but you're creating conditions for people to actually express themselves in a certain way.

How do you direct that and guide that in regards to creating those conditions for people to tell their best story?

Dream: ​You know, I think that it varies with each person, each project, you know, withSurviving R. Kelly, I don't know that it was a good experience for the women, the survivors. I think that we had a project that we were pretty certain we might face lawsuits for, and that had to be airtight in a particular way. So my questioning often probably felt like a deposition. I had to ask questions and follow up questions, not only in a way that a lawyer would, but in a way that the legal team at the production company, but he had written and approved the questions.[Marquise: Right] Meaning that the questions couldn't be leading, meaning that there had to be follow-up to a question. So if you tell me that you met R Kelly in the mall, I have to ask you if someone else was present at the all, can that person confirm that. I had to ask questions like a damn police would, you know? So the fact that they still felt safe enough to tell their stories probably still isn't a testament to some quality that I have, I think it speaks to the readiness that they brought to the project in terms of being committed to, like, understanding how long a part of the way that they were manipulated—I don't want to talk about R. Kelly—but just to answer this question about conditions and their readiness and their willingness to tell their story, even though it might've felt like hours long deposition for them, it speaks to a part of the way that they were manipulated was that R. Kelly made them feel like, you know, like all predators and manipulators, do you like that they’re the only one? Right. And then, say him disclosing the fact of his own sexual abuse as a child, was a kind of honor.

They'd been talking to each other before they came to this project. And when they find out that this is a part of a kind of grooming and a system, then they are understanding how many people have gone through this, how many victims there are, and they brought a particular readiness. Someone like ​Shelly Hilliard’s​ family, it was a lot of spending time with her mother. That project was brought to me by a poet in Detroit who was like, let's do this project. They had a whole different framework, they wanted to do a project that they were calling transwomen—they were still using transsexual, they were calling sex workers, prostitutes. So there was, like, a lot of like talking to that person, you get a poet about how it wrong I felt the frame was for what they wanted to do... and then going about the project, but then that poet who went on to talk about, I erased her from the film... that poet disappeared from the set, like literally disappeared and never came back.... And then later complained that she was erased, even though she had an ExecutiveProducer credit. But the only reason I'm telling that story is because the mother had a particular appreciation for the fact that I stayed in it, and that she never was wondering where I was and that I was always there, you know, and present, for her for her struggle really? ‘Cause she was suing the police department and she died before an award came from that police department, but they won that suit. The family won that suit and got a million dollars after ​Treasure​ was released. Not because of ​Treasure​, but because of the work. Yeah.

Marquise: ​Well, that's a beautiful project and congratulations again on that project. AndI think that it's changing, at least for me, I feel like they've really has changed the narrative on how we look at the survivors. And I think you did a great job of making sure that their voices were heard. So thank you for that film.

Dream: ​Oh yeah. A lot of people worked on it. I mean, ​Brie Bryant​ at Lifetime is as responsible for that film as I am, but thank you.

Marquise: ​Let’s switch just quickly, before we end, on prisons and the new work that you're doing as well. And we'll talk a little bit about Tulsa, but from the work that you do in prisons, give me a sense of what's important for you in that work, and what are you looking to bring out in regards to those stories?

Dream: I haven't been in a prison in three or four years. We did do ​It's a Hard Truth Ain’t It​, and that was co-directed by 12 brothers inside, and we wanted a transformative justice framework.

So this is a feature doc that we did on HBO. And there are just limitations to working with people in prison, because they are constantly being monitored and watched. I'll give you an example. We took ​John Legend​ into a men's prison in the California high desert. And inside that prison, we were in a ward where murderers were, and John was meeting with them, people that had been convicted of murder.

And there was this brother who got up to tell his story and it was horrific and it included being, um, raped as a child until he was a teenager. When he aged out of this pedophiles, um, you know... when the boy turned 13 or 14, the pedophile began raping his younger brother. And it was at that point that this man who was standing before us told us he murdered the pedophile. But as he's telling us the story meaning, you know, our little team, John Legend, there's a ward in there, there's the guards there. They're all taking notes by the way​... all of what he was telling us in the story would end up in a parole hearing that he might have, you know, or any kind of hearing. And there's a language. So he had to, after telling the story, he then had to add, “but I was wrong and I deserve to be be...” [Marquise: Wow.]

And I'm like, no, if you had money, you would have had a defense attorney who would have made it so that you'd never ended up in this place. Right? And that's the truth about his story, his individual story, but he has to present it in this way, because we have, you know, this is why I'm like, you know, this question of accountability..I too have been, even with the story I just told you about the poet... I had well, many people who came to me as, like, this is a great place for you to model accountability, to talk about how you erased this person from your film, and I'm like, the person has an executive producer credit. You literally cannot be erased from a project where you have an executive producer credit. Is this person out talking about the film with me? No, I don't even... I'm not even sure she watched it. She definitely wasn't there to make it right.

But my point is, that this accountability question in the prisons has become such that after decades of frigging self help books and all of this kind of, you know, soft “armchair psychology” kind of approach, we have decided that unless people cop to things that they may not have even, they should be copping to—given a systemic analysis—that the question of like a personal accountability, right, and a rhetoric around that has become, so, you know, system-wide that this man telling this, ​​he's telling this story about being raped as a child, and then, you know, suffixing it with this kind of accountability piece. I'm not even saying he was performing it for the warden or the guards who might've been taking notes. He may actually believe after, you know, a dozen—countless, actually—sections and circles, you know, whatever the count was, passing for counseling inside the walls. He may actually believe that being in prison is a just sentence. Right? So in that way, I mean, I arrived at the same place, you know, when ​Cathy Cohen​ and ​Rose Braz​, ​Ruthie Gilmore​, and ​Angela Davis​,when they began ​Critical Resistance​ and they came up with the framework in the mid-90’s, around ‘96 for the modern day abolition that's informing move cries that we hear in this moment...things like defund the police, abolish ICE, even.

And when you hear those demands, they're coming from...there's a movement mapping that one could do, where you would arrive at these for Black and brown queer women. Right? And one of the things that Kathy Cohen, I've heard her talk about Ruthie Gilmore—they talked about doing these ride-alongs with police, around like domestic violence, and you know, all of the things that one does when you're getting into this work around police and prisons and that's how they got to an abolitionist framework and it doesn't take you long being inside the walls, working in those conditions, and particularly in this moment with COVID, but obviously before COVID, there've been so many prison strikes and clear demands coming from the people inside of all genders, that prisons don't need to exist.

Marquise: ​No, we absolutely know that. Absolutely! ​What would you consider your process for coming up with those next projects? Do they come organically to you?

Dream: Tulsa isn't a project that I pitched. So R. Kelly is not a project that I pitched. The film that I did out of film school was a scripted, short narrative. What I want to do is more narrative, what my activist self gets pitched are documentaries, right?Sometimes those documentaries are so, in my mind, important that it becomes irresistible, that I have to do it, you know? And so that's what I'm looking for in a project, when folks are bringing it to me.

Marquise: How do you express those narrative stories?​

Dream: ​yeah. We work with a writer, you know, um, writers, write. Which is something...

Marquise: Pulling together pieces of a story that will then be transferred into a script with a writer is a process. And I guess that's where I'm getting at... it sounds like you have a narrative story that you would like to shape and to tell.

Dream: ​Well, I'm working on two adaptations. And yeah, it's not easy to even deal with estates and you know, things like that. And so I'm not even in a place to talk about it, though. Those are my dreams. There are like four films that I'd like to make before I die. And I think that I'm getting close to that... [laughter] the universe really did open up for me in a way that I'm grateful for, and it was from years of work, but that whole adage about if you take some steps towards your dream like that, the universal will open wide.....

Marquise: I always appreciate, candidly, the work that you've done, that we've been able to do together... and looking forward to opportunities, I know that we've talked about it in the past... I'd love to be able to see some of the work you do. I really appreciate the way that you do approach your voice, if I can say that... and being in that presence of that, helps to shape those stories. And I would say the people who have a real respect for you, and a real love for you, understand the complexity of that. And so I really appreciate that, and appreciate you taking that time.

Dream: I appreciate you too. And the work, the kind of work that you do to get these really rare stories. I love where your curiosity takes you, I really, even your decision to put Adrienne Marie Brown​ on the cover of Deem Journal, like you just really have an eye towards the future and just uplifting what other people may see as small stories.

Marquise: ​Yeah. I'm learning and I'm. I wanted to know, what are you reading right now? Are you reading anything that particular that people may want to spark?

Dream: ​Yeah, Salamishah Tillet wrote this ​amazing new book​ about, you know, AliceWalker and her work and just feminists and, um, who else has something out? ​Eddie Glaude has a book about James Baldwin​. Yes.

Marquise: Yes. I saw that! I want to pick that up. I want to pick that up. I just picked up bell hooks ​Art on my Mind: Visual Politics​. I think that the pier we're going in right now, I don't think that we pay enough attention to the visual politics. And it's something that's interesting right now, during this time... in how artists can be a part of the conversation from a visual standpoint.

So have you read that book? I know you're a big fan of bell hooks.

Dream: Yeah, for sure. When it comes to arts criticism, I also read the old school. You know, I read ​Clement Greenberg​.​ I really love ​Baraka​. He doesn't do visual arts, but Baraka is amazing. I'm excited for voices like ​Kimberly Drew​,​​Doreen St. Félix​ is interesting to me. There's a sister out of Britain, out of London, Jamaican Brit named ​Rianna Jade Parker​, who is not maybe30 and writes for the ​Frieze​ catalog and in other spaces, and is really great on visual art in particular. So yeah, in fact, there are a couple of Black British writers who are so excellent. But yeah, bell did play in that space a bit. It's not her strongest writing to me, but I do love—I remember, even in another book where she's talking about watching television in a non-passive way, and that always stayed with me. And she wasn't even talking about it as some kind of prescriptive thing, she was describing the way that Black folks are always talking back to TV in their households. And she was just framing that as this, basically resistance. And I just thought that was so brilliant. And it's something that I’m constantly doing.

Marquise: I love, I love bell hooks, so. Well dream, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Dream: ​Well, you for doing this podcast, Marquise. I think that ​your​ voice is really important and you have a patient way of being, and of listening, and an active way of listening and engaging folks. And it's just beautiful.

Marquise: ​Well, thank you.

Dream: ​So I'm really happy that your ears are, you know, present for podcasting. Cause you're a really good and deep listener. And I hope that there was stuff that you could use in this.

Marquise: ​Absolutely. This was great. I really thoroughly enjoyed it, and learned a lot as well. And so I hope you enjoyed it.

Dream: ​Yeah!