In RIOTSVILLE, USA, Director Sierra Pettengill, like a consummate painter with a cinematic palette, fuses archival national news media reportage from the late 1960s with archival U.S. military film and video footage from that same period in a cinematic exposition exposing the insidious nature of the militarization which was – and continues to be – primarily, but not exclusively, focused on Black people fighting for the real Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pettengill’s paints veraciously without one misstep of historical and philosophical significance unlike so many other chroniclers, filmmakers and documentarians of that period. – By Gregg W. Morris
