AGGIE During Quarantine
A letter from Catherine Gund to the AGGIE cast and crew during 2020 Covid Quarantine.
Hi lovely people, it was morning when I began writing this email, thinking I'd just tell you our one piece of news and move on to the day but then of course I was distracted again and again. and I wrote more than originally intended. Alas, no need to read on if you're in a different head space. Take care of yourselves and your families.
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So good to see some of you on the zoom last night. A simple treat and grounder while our heads are spinning. I hope everyone is hanging in there, keeping safe, taking care of their loved ones and themselves. I'm thinking about all of you.
Big news - finally and after many conversations and negotiations! - we have signed with STRAND RELEASING to handle the distribution of our film AGGIE.
Marcus Hu and Jon Gerans, who run the company, are friends and wonderfully well-respected colleagues in the indie film world. They have a beautiful catalogue that headlines queer and foreign-language films as well as many others. Check them out!
Of course, no one knows what indie film distribution will look like going forward. When will we be back in theaters (ever?) and how will we ever get to celebrate and gather in the ways our films are meant to be enjoyed. Panels, discussions, concerts, art exhibits, Q&As, and all of our other kinds of "activations", hang in the balance. I trust Marcus and Jon to help us navigate these unchartered territories, hopefully beginning with our New York City theatrical run at Film Forum in the fall (we'll keep you posted).
After whatever theatrical run we manage to achieve, we will head to ITunes and then streaming services, all the while participating in the abundant requests and possibilities at universities/colleges, museums, high schools, conferences, and other programs which are eager for invigorating, inspiring, and justice-forward content.
On a slightly more macro level - I read an article that in many ways sums up my experience of having a small, beloved organization and being filled with doubt and uncertainty about its future and all of ours. Some of you may know Gabrielle Hamilton... some of you may have eaten at the wonderfully cramped neighborhood institution Prune on the Lower East Side (right by the playground at First and First).
The title is "My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-restaurant-covid.html
To be clear, I do not have doubts that documentaries are needed now and in the future. Storytelling is among the most important tools we have for survival, communication, history, relationships, justice, purpose and creativity. So the trajectories are different, but the cloud of concern for those who work at Aubin, and every circle radiating from there, overwhelms.
There are the necessary daily tasks to keep the organization going like payroll, bills for our nearly renovated new office space, tech support for our far flung colleagues, and accounting for work that can't be finished in our personal absence from each other. There's keeping up with daily briefings, outlooks, ways to help, analysis; all the while we are trying to make sense for ourselves and our families of what motivates the cruelty, greed and inhumanity of our federal government and the cow-towing Republicans who debase themselves into kissing Trumps ass at every opportunity.
There's helping organize grants to gain early release for so many incarcerated in jails, prisons, detention centers whose lives are at stake every single day they remain inside, all to often for being unable to afford the cash bail. We've responded in Ohio, New York City and nationally. Zoom after zoom call to bring others on board, to raise up those working on the front lines to get early release for juveniles, and not a minute too soon for elders, striving all the while for permanent freedom for all who get out now and for those still in limbo. And for Aubin to keep communicating with everyone we can, all possible stakeholders - our collaborators, fellow filmmakers, people who have partnered with us as advisors and strategy table members, people who care about the same issues we care about, people who need community as much as we do right now.'
Then there was filing for the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) which ended up not going to small businesses and nonprofits like Aubin, but rather to Ruth Christ's Steak House, Shake Shack and Harvard University. We never even heard back enough to be rejected. We just threw our (mostly Andrea's - thank you!) efforts into the abyss. Lost now like so many plans for March, April, May... the summer, the year, the time until there is a vaccine that is affordable, accessible, universal. There's the impossibility of fundraising at a time of desperation, hunger, danger, and death of so many. But we are committed to not laying anyone off, not furloughing and in fact, maintaining our commitment to bringing on (at least) two new staff members in the coming months. Oh and that big beautiful office, awaiting not only our minds and bodies to warm it up, but also all the people we hope will gather there. We have already postponed three events in the new space: the book party for Tanya Selvaratnam's now-delayed book publication, the celebration for the Tribeca film festival screening of the brilliant film Disclosure, and the office warming itself. So much on pause.
That's all to say, it was a relief to read such a resonant piece by a woman I've known tangentially located at the midpoint of my family's walk from home to the elementary school on Third street and Avenue A. All four of my kids went there and I took that walk every school day for 14 years. We started walking through the "tree tunnel" along Chrystie Street from Grand Street to Houston a couple months before Prune started making it's tiny space a second home for so many in the neighborhood, folks whose kids went to the neighborhood's public school, The Neighborhood School.
And here we are, left wondering. Still. But together. Keep going. Keep on. Stay strong. Sending you all much love, Cat
Catherine Gund for the Kitchen Gala
Catherine Gund for the Kitchen Gala
Thank you Jackie. And now I’m going to say something about you.
When you choose each other as family before the state admits your families were real, and nearly
forty years later you’re still making movies together, with better equipment and the same love of
line dancing...
Having that person introduce you is not just an honor, it is a singular gift. I receive your words as
a mirror. A whole life reflected in the face of someone who was there for all of it, and stayed.
Thank you all ways and forever, Jackie.
***
Garrett Bradley, Shari Frilot, Cheryl Dunye. I love you all long time.
Shari, Cheryl and I have been friends longer than Garrett has been alive. Our extraordinary little
sister is up here with us tonight, and she’s taught us all a thing or two, or a thousand. Garrett,
you’re doing the damn thing. Keep going.
These are not colleagues. They’re the people who sustained my belief - in an actively hostile
world - that a camera can be a tool of liberation. Not a metaphor. An actual civic instrument. The
way a ballot is. The way a strike is. The way testimony is. Precise and purposeful.
At its best, documentary redistributes visibility. Whose grief matters. Whose memory survives.
Whose interior life counts as history. Because attention is a public resource. What a society
learns to see shapes what it’s willing to protect.
And here we all are. Still standing. Still making. Still each other’s collaborators, instigators,
family. And when the moment requires it, each other’s scaffolding - the temporary structure that
makes permanent things possible.
***
The Kitchen is younger than I am but older than my non profit production company Aubin
Pictures. Since 1971 the Kitchen has been a place where the avant-garde was not a club but a
commitment. Fifty-five years later, Legacy Russell proves this transformative experiment isn’t
over, that necessary cultural work will still find its home. Legacy, thank you for this honor.
***
I keep coming back to a song.
When my daughter and her best friend Safiyah and I were finishing What's On Our Plate? our
doc about kids and food politics, our office song was the Staple Singers’ “I'll Take You There” –
the THERE being the better world the girls were working toward. Their future.
I still hear it as Aubin's anthem. “I'll take you there” is not escapism. It’s a political statement.
Documentary insists another world is imaginable because people are already practicing it.
That's the throughline.
Each of Aubin’s films asks the same question: what becomes possible when domination is forced
to loosen its grip? Because supremacy works first by shrinking the imaginable. Documentary, at
its best, enlarges the human horizon.
***
This year, Aubin turns thirty. So does Sadie. Both born in 1996. And honestly, she raised Aubin
right alongside me.
Sadie and my son Kofi, thank you for being here. Every film I've ever made grows out of some
combination of terror and hope for the world my four children are inheriting. They are the reason
I believe in the future. Which, given current conditions, is genuinely saying something.
My mantra: "make films, make love, make dinner." Not simultaneously. Food safety issue.
I started Aubin with Scot Nakagawa, one of the great political minds I’ve known. He can’t be
here tonight but it’s worth noting that our very first film was called When Democracy Works,
which lands differently in 2026 than it did in 1996, and Scot knew even then that it would.
We started with a Hi-8 camera, and a politics forged in the fire of the AIDS crisis. I picked up a
camera with DIVA TV, in ACT UP, because official language had already failed us. The
government’s archive was organized around our disappearance.
So we made our own record of the living. A counter-memory.
The work has always been an ecosystem. Justice-oriented art emerges not from individual
creativity alone but from communities of care, through rooms where viewers can learn to see
power as it operates. Culture is collective infrastructure.
Right now, in 2026, watching democratic life dismantled in real time, I keep thinking:
democracy is about whether people can recognize one another as fully human across difference.
Whether testimony can shift power. That’s why art matters. Not because art decorates
democracy. But because art is where democracy rehearses itself.
***
One last thing. I'm at the age where sometimes I reach for a word and it isn't quite there. I circle
around it. My mother, near the end of her life, got so frustrated by that gap - between what she
meant and what she could reach - that she stopped talking. Not entirely. But enough that the
silence became its own kind of statement, but I wanted her to keep searching, circling.
That is a documentary. Not mastery. Not certainty. The disciplined act of staying with
complexity long enough for the truth underneath language to emerge. A refusal of the speed and
simplification that authoritarianism requires.
Jackie and Shari and Cheryl and I, we're in the circling years. And Garrett and Kofi and Sadie,
they're going to find some of the words we can't reach anymore. And we're going to give them
the context that makes those words mean something. That's not the passing of a baton. That's a
conversation. Ongoing. Unfinished. The way all the best documentary films are. You screen
them, the lights come up, and the real work begins.
And that's what The Kitchen has always been. Not the answer. The conversation. The work.
The direction matters, even when progress moves at the speed of grief.
We want to live in a world where culture teaches us how to remain accountable to one another’s
humanity. And every time we gather in rooms like this, refusing the logic of isolation and
disappearance, we belong to one another. And belonging is how history becomes something
other than brutality.
"I'll take you there."
The deeper truth, of course, is that we'll take each other there.
Thank you for belonging with me.