Right now, reading our 95-page screenplay, I see the animate force of our film’s story emerging, bristling with roots straining against concrete and capitalist malaise; stretching through the Sonoma and Mendo woods to the wild sovereign spaces with older names, beyond all maps; and reaching back to our Bay Area’s urban beauty blooming. Characters have taken on shape, blood and bone, incarnated from ancestral trauma which is our own, with ancient futurist energies forging previously unimagined worlds.

Over the course of writing and rewriting, our story has transformed. It began as an episodic set of filmed collaborations with individual performance artists on distinct land bases. Now, it is a feature-length dramatic character-driven mythic journey of two siblings healing from depression, genocide, unprocessed loss and grief, evolving in community through longing, struggle, play and laughter. Ideas and abstractions have rooted in specific soil, as particular living beings in conflict and transformation.

Now, with a polished hour-and-a-half draft, we are ready to share with a broader circle of producers. We are poised, firm in our conviction that we will make something both visionary and liberatory in its support of movement and social change, and also something artistically compelling and coherent, rooted in ancient narrative traditions while inspired by contemporary beauty. Now we are reflecting on the first phase of this huge project, to share the bounty of experience and learnings we are harvesting as we transition to our next phase.

PHOTO ID: Five people stand shoulder-to-shoulder smiling in dappled sunlight in front of an adobe building, with a tree in the foreground and stairs ascending in the background. Caption: Our Writing Circle gathering in May 2026 at The Nest in Forestville. From right: Bernadette Zambrano, Ras K’dee, Mwende Hinojosa, Redbird Ed Willie, and Mateo Hinojosa.

As with all things, there are manifold roots for this project. And, looking back, it is clear that the seed emerged from a 2019 Bay Area BIPOC Land Justice Convening, in which 30 organizers envisioned 100 years of land justice. Manifold roots then sprouted and were nourished by: our ardent desire, shared by many at that convening, to bring joy, play and culturally rooted creativity into our movement work; the vocal discomfort of our colleagues with ubiquitous monocultural narrative structures and the dis-ease of nonprofit storytelling-turned-marketing; the desire to remedy these problems with culturally rooting and collectively fruiting story processes never before attempted. We heard voices coming especially strongly from our Indigenous and Black colleagues—so these were the communities and partners that we invited to envision a radical film together. We mean radical in the sense rooted and in dramatic departure from the norm.

Reflecting on this, Mwende and I, partners in storytelling, began wondering how we might best honor and nourish those roots, that radical power, to continue the work begun in 2019 with that circle of organizers. And: how could we leverage the extraordinary wave of land stewardship gains following the convening by many of the organizations that were present? It was a moment of astounding fruiting after decades of movement organizing. The answer came to us, surprisingly clearly: we could make a film, experimental yet popularly accessible; narrative and collectively written; with stories of humans healing with the land; with radical production modes; emerging from the land and her people, for the good of the land and her people.

We wondered: what stories are being embodied already and want broader manifestation? What stories will amplify and embody the movements and communities creating the practices our planet and people need? How can we pay everyone well for the creative work they long to do in support of deep culture change? What would this area—the Bay, Sonoma, Mendocino, city, woods, coast, farmland, Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo and Kashia territories—look like if we were to succeed in building our dreams?

PHOTO ID: Five people stand on a wood platform laughing in dappled sunlight; one person stands in the background in front of a 2-story adobe building. Caption: Our Writing Circle playing in October 2024 at The Nest in Forestville. From right: Layel Camargo, Raven Marshall,  Mwende Hinojosa, Bernadette Zambrano, Ras K’dee, adélàjá simon.

We pitched our idea to the organizing circle of the 2019 convening, and they generously gave us their support for the project to advance. So, we gathered our co-inspirators on the land and started our film production process by listening. We listened to the land: the trees, birds and insects sang to us of what was and what might be, of genocide and struggle, of return and renewal. We listened to those who tend the land, and in both place and people we hear yearning: for new narratives embodied, old languages revived, living relationships tended, communications revitalized with humor and magic. We wondered: how can we break out of the business-as-usual boxes that constrain our relationships and stories, both in form and content? How can we re-harmonize these modern modes and media with our cultural traditions?

We held 4 workshops throughout 3 years, gatherings shaded by black walnut and serenaded by juncos. Read about our first Participatory Narrative Workshop here. They were creatively generative, energizing and restful—a major departure from both standard film writing processes and conventional movement organizing meetings. We gathered ~30 people from many organizations on three land bases: The Cultural Conservancy’s Heron Shadow, Shelterwood Collective, and The Nest; folks from these organizations participated alongside Sustainable Economies Law Center staff and folks involved in land tending with Black to the Land / Emerald Earth, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, EARTHseed, Movement Generation, and more organizations, some of whom have partnered with the project formally and others who are simply inspiring the individuals who are formally partnering. Together, we realized that this project wanted to be an open invitation to our collective organizations to engage as they wish, and a deeply personal project for all of us. We realized it needed to be both deep and funny. Collectively we decided to draw on the cultural traditions of our ancestry: Pomo, Wintu, Yaqui, Kamba, Quechua, Anishinaabe, Yoruba, Haitian, Lakota, and more.

PHOTO ID: A woman sits in a huge carved wooden throne, framed by black walnut leaves and observed by five people who sit in the foreground listening. Caption: Mwende Hinojosa speaks from the Storytelling Seat at Heron Shadow, where we told each other stories of land reunion at our first writing work/playshop in June of 2023.

The screenplay was written by Mwende and me, guided by major collaborations from our writing circle, Layel Camargo-Velasquez, Ras K’dee, Raven Marshall, Redbird Willie, adélàjà simon and Bernadette Zambrano, and guidance from our executive producer, Melissa K. Nelson. We used collaborative software to facilitate contribution, gathering online and then again periodically in person. All of us have been working separately and together on different land projects, and our personal journeys are woven into the story.

The characters began as sketches: of a witness, and of a series of communities reclaiming land, and their connection with it, in a web of Indigenous and Black sovereign spaces connected by a Path. The witness then became two characters: siblings, one genderqueer and one cismale, both adults confined by their circumstances, by the structures of the capital system and by unprocessed loss. We realized they live in Oakland, struggle with mental illness and addiction, and yearn to reconnect with their childhood home along Bidabaté, the Russian River. Their languages began to come alive, especially Southern Pomo, as it became clear most of the story takes place in Pomo territories. Feeling into the fierce conflicts in these zones, soon we discovered that their auntie lived in a land that burned to the ground in the wildfires caused by water mismanagement and the extreme temperatures of our time. The writing circle realized that the Path is magical, and was created during the genocide by medicine people in collaboration with the spirits of the land, especially traditional Pomo beings: k’awa little people with mischievous wisdom, and the Bigfoot guardians of the deep forest.

The land whispered to us of longing: for what we know we are here for. For people to walk the land once more. For bioregional revitalization. For cultivating and guarding places free from and acting against the rapacious extraction and invasive exploitation of colonial control. For the largely forgotten and untended spirits of this land. For the medicines to find their people once again. For the languages and ceremony that once kept our relationships on our lips and in our bodies. For the guardians of the truth and of dreams that might expand our perception of the possible, might someday become more real.

As we talked about the dances and songs needed to heal the traumas and grieve the losses, we imagined the Pomo sacred clowns, who have hardly been seen for generations—might we invite them to appear in our film, and so invite them to appear again in our world in this time? As our characters encountered these other characters, traversed these specific communities, we found antagonists began to emerge: government, industry, AI. We found humor, absurdity and astonished joy in what became possible with a story given space to be fully wild; even the antagonists became colorful and outlandishly fascinating. And so our script took on a body with a life of its own, with a beating heart and legs that propelled it across the landscape. It is a strange body, to be sure, with many parents and countless ancestors, and it looks not quite like any I’ve seen before. It is astoundingly beautiful, beyond anything we could have made alone, or even with one or two other partners.

PHOTO ID: A woman sits outside looking at a comic book / graphic novel titled “Indigo Clan” as another woman points to a detail in the drawing and another man sits looking at other graphic novels in the background. Caption: Our writing circle in May 2026 at The Nest discusses a local graphic novel as an inspiration for our initial dreaming into how to spin the script into a graphic novel as an intermediate step between a script and a film.

Throughout this process, in the writing circle we found that collectively we knew so many stories from our lineages, stories our ancestors passed on as lore, as guiding stars. We found so much inspiration and laughter in our lived experiences, in our various journeys in land reunion, as well as in magical realism, journey myths and botanical legends, road movies and local comics, music videos and land dance.

Also, perhaps most radically, we decided to produce this film paying all equally, above and below the line, cast and crew. How would film production change if we paid everyone the exact same day rate, and ensured that the entire process is as good as the product throughout? How can we build a protopian vision of the world in the community collaborations that create that vision through process, through embodying?

One of the best things I ever made was a video-poem in collaboration with the organizations The Cultural Conservancy and Yakanal, in which Pueblo youth went to interview their elders to learn Keres. The knowledge transmission was evident, manifest in the product as well as in the process, whose power was embodied in the film. There are films and shows where you can tell that the people had a great time making the movie—the heartwarming vibes radiate from the screen, inspiring you to gather your own crew, make your own magic. I’ve felt this when watching Agnes Varda and Richard Linklater films, as well as Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs and Taika Waititi’s Boy. This is what we aspire to with Rootbound.

Our next steps: continue to move at the speed of trust, and make the screenplay into a graphic novel; create a short film from one scene; then, gather the resources needed to make the full feature film. There is a story that only we can tell, and that can only be told now. What is that story? What happens if we then expand our “we” to include a gradually broader and deeper circle? What might we learn if we let the land speak through us? How do we disentangle our roots from these cramped narrative and living spaces afforded by this society? How do we grow healthily after forced involution, beyond the walls that have bound us? How do we liberate our storied roots to truly thrive?