Black Lake, 16mm to digital (in production). Collaboration with Laurie Robins.

May 9th, 1970, Emmett County, Michigan: architect Oscar Stonorov and United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther die when their chartered plane crashes en route to their last collaboration – the newly opened Black Lake Family Education Center, a modernist woodland campus designed to train UAW workers and set a more ecological direction for the union.

Opening with the tragic crash—viewed with suspicion in some quarters given Reuther’s antagonism toward the Nixon Administration—the 16mm short-feature experimental documentary Black Lake moves from winter to summer at the Center, braiding UAW members’ on-location readings of texts from its past, documentation of union trainings, and vignettes about the forces that shaped it in order to probe the site’s historical contradictions and its potentialities in the present.