Directed & PRODUCED Christina D. Bartson
Narration by Sonia Desai Rayka
Also Resisters considers solidarity across generations and geography. Adapted from a 1968 essay by the gay American socialist David E. McReynolds, the short archival film takes the images and sounds of the American war in Vietnam to reflect on the feedback loop between militarism abroad and at home — and the people who resisted it.
about the film
ALSO RESISTERS premiered at the Big Sky Film Festival. It also played at Mountainfilm, Mimesis Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, SFFILM Doc Stories, DOC NYC, and was an Official Selection of The Smalls.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Christina D. Bartson is a filmmaker and archivist based in London with roots in the American Midwest. Her work explores the political economy of media and how narratives of conflict, social movements, and land are mobilized—and often metastasized—through archival materials.
Her work has been supported by If/Then Shorts and Field of Vision, Arts Council England, 2024 NBCUniversal Original Voices Accelerator Fellowship, 2023 Global Research Initiatives Fellowship (New York University), 2023 Moore Research Fellowship (Swarthmore College), and more. She holds her M.A. from New York University where her graduate research focused on critical media theory, ethnographic cinema, and war media, and her B.A. from Emerson College.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
Thank you so much for sharing Also Resisters as part of this series—it means a lot to be among many talented filmmakers.
My name is Christina, and I’m a filmmaker and archivist based in London, with roots in the American Midwest. Like many of my peers, I came to film in a roundabout way. My first love has always been dance, and I think that sensibility—an attention to rhythm, gesture, movement—still shapes the way I approach storytelling.
Film came later, after years of working as a journalist and researcher, while secretly harboring a desire to put images, words, and music together on screen. At 25, I began working in documentary production and quickly found myself drawn to archival research, which has since become my professional home. My practice as a filmmaker is entirely animated by the archive and my fascination with questions of inheritance, collective memory, and how we can mobilize materials from the past to resist violences, shatter our psychological complicity, and reveal our porousness to others near and far.
My academic background is in journalism and media theory, and my political grounding comes from a Marxist critical media practice. Anti-imperialism, solidarity, mutual aid, and civic engagement are inseparable from my practice. Editing my own work during graduate school was the first time I felt I’d finally found the right form to express, and deepen, these commitments.
I live in archives and libraries, constantly encountering materials that surprise me and move me. Years ago I began keeping a spreadsheet of the gems I found, and eventually started cutting small experiments. That process grew into Also Resisters. Editing has become the heart of my practice—the challenge of assembling disparate fragments into something whole is endlessly compelling to me. I love it.
Because I come to filmmaking with what might seem like a random, patchwork background—dancer, journalist, academic, activist—it may not make sense on paper. But when I sit down to edit, it really clicks. For me, filmmaking is a way of locating myself and others in our complex, confusing, joyous, and heartbreaking world. It’s a way to feel less lonely when we’re puzzling the big questions and trying to metabolize a world that often doesn’t make any sense. Today, I see myself as an artist who is equally devoted to the archive, to writing, to dance, to political organizing, and to my friends.
Tell us about the genesis of Also Resisters. Where did the idea come from and how did you develop it?
The film began with a book I stumbled upon: We’ve Been Invaded by the 21st Century, a 1968 collection of political essays by the American socialist and nonviolence activist David McReynolds. I fell in love with his voice—flawed but deeply moral, incisive, and resonant with my own experience of being politicized by living in the heart of the very violent and undemocratic empire called America. For David, it was the American war in Vietnam; for me, it has been Israel’s genocide in Palestine. He was a twenty-something in New York protesting daily; I was a twenty-something in New York protesting nightly. Reading his work was a way of locating my grief and rage in that of another generation.
While researching David, I discovered Googling him one day that he was also a gifted photographer. I found a website showcasing his images and sent over a message to the email listed asking about the archive. Then something totally odd happened. A woman named Ruth responded – she is an activist and an old friend of David’s who worked for many years with him at the War Resisters League. It turns out that Ruth holds his archive and lives just blocks from my old home in Brooklyn. She invited me over to her house the next day. That encounter sparked one of the most extraordinary friendships of my life with Ruth and her husband Ed, both longtime activists. I spent much of 2023 and 2024 sprawled across their living room floor, sifting through David’s images while having the most incredible conversations about politics, war resistance, cats, art, love, and everything in between. They are still dear friends and when I go back to New York for DOC NYC this November, they’re among the people I am most excited to catch up with.
At first, I imagined the film might be biographical. I even spent time at David’s archive at Swarthmore College as a research fellow. But gradually it became clear that what I wanted to explore was solidarity, especially intergenerational solidarity. So I returned to the essay that first drew me in. My best friend Sonia – who is also the greatest artist I know – recorded herself reading a passage, and I began cutting archival footage to her voice. The first sequence I assembled became the center of the film, and it’s remained virtually unchanged since.
The film is ultimately about how young people locate themselves in histories of resistance—because David believed, rightly I think, that young people not only have a strong moral compass but act on it. That belief runs through the film’s images and sounds. And actually, I should mention that all of the images at the end of student protests are photographs taken by other student photographers.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making also resisters and how did you overcome them?
Audio turnover. Honestly, audio turnover is excruciating. I watched probably dozens of YouTube tutorials and phoned my best friend Elisa, who’s an incredible editor, whenever I got stuck.
The bigger, recurring obstacle was the research itself. When you’re working with archives, the temptation is to never stop—there’s always one more box, one more reel. Part of the discipline is knowing when to step away and start shaping what you already have.
I’m drawn to archival footage precisely because it forces us to confront what we’ve inherited. The archive is both a repository of history and a technology of power. I’m always asking: What do we do with these materials? How do they locate us in history, materially and emotionally? How do images make us confront our complicity within structures of violence and resistance?
For me, it isn’t about making new images but about resurfacing existing ones and asking what they mean in our present. It’s about using images as a site of power analysis: what’s inside the frame, and just as importantly, what lies outside it—the institutions, money, and politics that shape what we see. That’s also why the Department of Defense footage is so interesting to me. It is shocking and dizzying to see these young men running around with really nice government issued cameras filming mundane things, but also literally filming their participation in war crimes.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights and/or online release.
The film premiered at Big Sky in February 2025, just weeks after a really big life rupture. Standing on stage during the Q&A, experiencing an audience engage with this piece of my heart and mind, really reminded me what cinema is all about: the desire to be moved and to exchange these fragments of our humanity. It marked the beginning of a year of wild connection, of returning to myself by opening up to others.
One highlight was screening in Sarajevo. Afterward, a young activist and filmmaker approached me. We went for coffee the next day and talked about her studies, growing up in the Balkans, and why art is so central to resistance. That conversation remains one of the most meaningful parts of this whole journey.
Cinema, at its best, is resistance to apathy. In a world that numbs and pacifies us, film insists on feeling—on mobilizing our emotions toward solidarity. The process is necessarily vulnerable, and that’s what makes it so precious.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
Watch everything you can. Cultivate deep, beautiful friendships with other artists—these are the most sustaining relationships in life. Stop judging yourself. And always keep your heart on your sleeve. That, to me, feels like the most important thing.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Scenes of Extraction by Sanaz Sohrabi
Soundtrack for a Coup d’État by Johan Grimonprez
My Name Is Oil by Igor Smola (I’m working on a new project about oil, so I’ve been immersed in these works)
Everything by Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, RaMell Ross, Elizabeth Lo, and Sierra Pettengill
And one reading recommendation: Hanif Abdurraqib. He recently quoted Lester Bangs writing about Richard Hell in 1977: “The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.”
That line has stayed with me. As Hanif puts it, the work—whether art, writing, or filmmaking—only matters if it deepens our solidarity and our friendships. If your heart isn’t growing, it’s atrophying. And once it atrophies, it’s nearly impossible to retrieve.
