‘It was always about land’: film-maker Raoul Peck on his infuriating new documentary
To the naked eye, Silver Dollar Road is a lush strip of pavement on a coastal flat, leading south to tidewater shoreline near Beaufort, North Carolina. The land teems with katydid choruses, the water with shrimp – enough for several members of the Reels family to make a living as fisherman, their boats dotting the sandy shore. There are creeks to either side of the Reelses’ 65 acres of land, some wooded and some open, purchased by Mitchell Reels just one generation removed from slavery.
To the Reels family, the land is indispensable, precious, indisputable. As captured in decades’ worth of home video and photos assembled in Silver Dollar Road, documentarian Raoul Peck’s riveting and infuriating new film, the land was a Black community haven – a rare beachfront away from white surveillance and suspicion, a safe social hub, a locus for prosperity and security. Several generations of Reelses and their extended families grew up there, or vacationed there, or were buried there.
The land along Silver Dollar Road fulfilled a promise of Reconstruction: that land ownership, and the generational wealth derived from it, would be open to Black Americans. The film, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, opens with a title card quoting the Rev Garrison Frazier, speaking on behalf of 20 Black ministers to the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Land was wealth and legitimacy, finally permitted and then, over decades, taken away; as another title card points out, Black farmers lost 90% of their land during the 20th century.
By the early 2000s, the Reels family was fighting for theirs in court. Suspicious of financial institutions long prejudiced against Black people, Mitchell Reels died in the 1970s without leaving a will. His land became so-called heirs’ property – an obscure legal loophole that “most lawyers, most judges cannot explain,” said Peck — which passed it to relatives like an informal holding company. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, a long absent brother of Mitchell’s secretly sold his deed to developers, who saw in Silver Dollar Road potential waterfront lots and dollar signs. Two of the Reels descendants, brothers Melvin and Licurtis, refused to leave the land on which they had lived for decades, and starting in 2011 spent eight years in jail – jail, not prison, because they were never convicted of a crime.
The film, based on Lizzie Presser’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica, is at once a celebration of the Reelses’ resilience and pride in their home, a lesson on the pernicious history of Black land dispossession, a portrait of one community’s fight to free the Reels brothers and a measured, scathing condemnation of their incarceration. “What is behind that story is basically the whole history of the United States,” said Peck, who has previously explored the history of racist colonialism in the docu
series Exterminate All the Brutes and the legacy of civil rights icon James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro.
From the introduction of private property as a concept to the use of enslaved people to extract value from the land, the US “excluded the very people who are the center of that wealth from benefitting from that wealth,” said Peck. “And it goes on and on – the civil war, reconstruction, 40 acres and a mule ... it was always about land. That’s the core story, that’s the DNA of what the United States of America is today. So that’s why this story, for me, is way bigger than the Reels family.”
Nevertheless, Silver Dollar Road is a deeply humanist film, largely embedded with the Reels family for the better part of three years. (Peck draws on some 90-plus hours of footage filmed by Mayeta Clark for the ProPublica story). There’s footage of matriarch Gertrude Reels, weathered and homebound by the incarceration of her sons, waiting for them to call. A Reels nephew who has taken over the shrimping business. Home video footage of land speculators scoping out Melvin’s property, and of Melvin’s boat mysteriously capsized. Of primary importance are Melvin and Licurtis’s sister Mamie Reels Ellison and her niece, Kim Duhon, who lead the charge navigating a legal labyrinth to keep the land and free the brothers.
There are protests and vigils, Christmas parties and old photos of Melvin’s beachfront nightclub. “I didn’t want to put the prison case as the dominant issue,” said Peck. “I really needed to start with the family as a family, and portray them as human beings, not as victims,” he said.
He was able to do so in part because of Presser’s research and the backing of ProPublica, which verified Peck’s recounting of an admittedly – and deliberately – arcane legal morass along with family and regional history. “I could assert my subjectivity while I was on solid ground. That was an incredible force for the film,” he said.
“I could be very subjective in my choices. I stay with the family. I don’t care about the other side,” he added. “All my life, I have listened to the other side. Every film is about the other side. I needed to stay with the family.” Talking heads occasionally provide context on heirs’ property or the court system in Carteret country, North Carolina; “it defies logic that any of that constitutes justice,” one lawyer says of the Reels brothers’ legal fight and jail time. But the bulk of the film goes the Reels family and community, processing their disbelief, frustration, weariness and determination in real time. “This film is a beginning for me, not an end,” said Peck. “The life of the family continues. Their fight will continue, the next generation will pick [it] up.”
The Reels brothers are back on Silver Dollar Road, but the murky threat of Black land dispossession continues. According to ProPublica, 76% of African
Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans, threatening more property into unstable heirs’ arrangements. And heirs’ property is estimated to compose more than a third of southern Blackowned land – 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28bn, liable for legally sanctioned theft.
Peck sees the film as, in part, a wake-up call and an education. “I hope it will push you to take a look, or talk to a few people, talk to your family or your friends, what can you do?” Peck said. “Know your history, know what’s the deal today, why are we in this situation today, and know that you’re part of it.”
Silver Dollar Road is now available on Amazon Prime Video
around the visitor center and the park highway that merged with the Dixie and another recently sparked fire.
The flames of the Dixie consumed wide swaths of the park, chewing through the backcountry bridges of the Pacific Crest Trail and devouring a nearly century-old fire lookout.
Firefighters managed to achieve their mission. The visitor center was spared, as were the towns of Mill Creek, Mineral and Old Station. The damage to Lassen was extensive and unprecedented – staff are still calculating the total cost of the losses. But years of prescribed burns helped to temper the worst effects of the fire.
Even with the damages, Richardson was struck by what remained. Most of the facilities survived, and in some areas, high-intensity fire had slowed or burned out entirely thanks to prescribed fire projects and manual work to thin out trees, remove dead trees and clear pine needles from buildings.
That work over the last 20 years ultimately helped reduce the severity of the Dixie fire in the park, said Gary Bucciarelli, an ecologist and the director of the University of California, Davis’s Natural Reserves Lassen field station. Fire is a vital part of the ecosystem, he said, and without it, fuel loads build up and the fires that occur are more severe.
“When you’re not letting those natural fires occur, when you’re not letting fire have a role, fires become devastating,” he said. “That’s what we’ve seen – these huge fires that are not the type of fires that normally occurred in these ecosystems.”
‘Nature is adaptable’
From a distance, the trail next to the Kohm Yah-mah-nee visitor center appears to offer a window into all the devastation wrought by the Dixie fire.
The path unfurls itself through blackened forest with singed trees, but as it winds over a bridge and up a hillside, there is a sudden burst of green. The land is verdant and dotted with wildflowers. Grasshoppers emit an electric hum that fills the air.
Many of the burned trees are gone – with help from the Mooretown Rancheria of Maidu Indians of California. The hazards have been removed, though some bridges in the back country await replacement. The park highway offers a glimpse of the area’s natural wonders and a living model of what happens when fire moves through the landscape.
Visitors often remark to Ranger Russell Rhoads how sad it is to see Lassen this way. While high-severity burn areas may take decades to recover, the ecosystem remains viable, he said, and the park has even more prescribed burns planned.
“For a lot of people, all they see is sort of the black and brown,” Rhoads said. “There’s still beauty in between.”
If you look closely, you can see there’s mushrooms and insects that will act as decomposers for dead logs, Rhoads said, and those insects will eventually serve as food to birds and other animals.
Even the rotting tree stumps will have larger grubs that the bears can eat, Rhoads added. There are opportunities for new plant growth within the burn areas and the diminished tree canopy allows for the growth of shrubs and grasses that will feed other animals. Birds of prey can more easily navigate the forest.
In the presentations on the Dixie fire that he gives at the visitor center, Rhoads tries to remind people that fire is a part of this land. Some trees only spread their seed during fires.
“People say: ‘I’ve never seen it like this my entire lifetime that I lived here.’ In my lifetime, it’s all I see,” he said. “Fire was suppressed during your entire lifetime, the fuels accumulated and now it’s just unmanageable.”
But Rhoads is optimistic about the future. Nature is characterized by change, he said. “It’s adaptable. It’s able to just sort of do what it wants it to do.”
The resilience of Lassen is visible across the landscape, he said. At Chaos
Jumbles, the site of a massive rockfall 350 years ago, a field of seemingly impenetrable rocks stretches across the land, yet trees somehow make their home there.
“This is obviously not the most hospitable terrain, but it still popped out one way or another,” he said. “That’s just the way this ecosystem is. It gets thrown a hard pass, and then it just recovers and does something different. It doesn’t have to turn back into what it was before.”
she made during the campaign about “rigged” election maps. That effort has subsided – for now.
Leo’s candidate lost in Wisconsin – but his efforts over the years have succeeded in something else: transforming seats on state supreme courts into political prizes. In many states, such judges are no longer viewed as independent arbiters from a branch of government that operates outside partisanship but as a kind of superlegislator. “That’s bad for the system,” Robert Orr, a former Republican North Carolina justice, told us. “It’s bad for democracy. It’s a very dangerous path to tread down.”
In a written statement, Leo said state courts “are more independent and impartial today than they were when trial lawyers and unions dominated state judicial races without any counter”.
The stakes for democracy are stark. Already, a University of Washington study ranking the health of democracies in states found North Carolina and Wisconsin have plummeted from two of the highest-scoring states to scraping the bottom.
One result of this project is clear. Today, the practice of deploying every weapon in the American political arsenal, from nasty campaign ads to spending by groups whose donors are hidden, is now a routine aspect of campaigns for the judges who rule on state laws and, in 2024, might well decide the outcome of elections in battleground states.
The article is posted in cooperation with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyare published
that same-sex marriage was a violation of India’s religious and cultural norms. The same government had previously opposed the promotion of a judge to the supreme court on the basis of his sexuality.
Despite not having much belief in the institution of marriage for herself, Tuesday’s ruling came as a blow to Khanna. “Maybe it was too radical in this political environment, when the government is clearly so opposed to it,” she said. “But there’s so much resilience in the community and the fight will continue.”
It was a view echoed by many LGBTQ+ people, who said they were devastated but not cowed by the verdict, even as older queer couples, some in their 70s, worried they were running out of time. Some said they would be taking to the streets; others said the LGBTQ+ community needed to rally to become a louder political voice to bring about change.
Parmesh Shahani, who runs Godrej DEI Lab – which works for LGBTQ+ inclusion across cultural and corporate sectors – and is the author of a book, Queeristan, emphasised that legal setbacks had been a part of the struggle for two decades.
“Is it disappointing? Yes. Will we get up from this and move on? Almost certainly,” Shahani said. “Already the societal changes I’ve seen in the past five years, we could never, ever have imagined. Now the onus is on all of us to really shift hearts and minds – in civil society, in our homes and our families and our workplaces – and create an inclusive society so that whenever this comes up again, it is no longer a debate.”
Much frustration among the LGBTQ+ community was directed towards the panel of judges for pushing the issues back into the lap of the BJP government, which as done little to advance LGBTQ+ rights and equality in its nine years in power, and in many cases has taken openly discriminatory positions.
Zainab Patel, a transgender woman who was one of the petitioners, applauded one of the few wins that did come out of the judgment – that transgender people in heterosexual relationships could legally get married – but said overall “it seemed like the judges all abdicated their responsibility towards the community, and it was a serious letdown.”
Like most, she was sceptical that the high-level committee that the government has agreed to establish, to examine LGBTQ+ rights, would do anything other than “a few cosmetic changes at the most”.
Others expressed concern that the ruling had done lasting damage to the fight for civil liberties. Rohin Bhatt, one of the lawyers who fought the case and who is gay, said the judgment was “very, very dangerous” in its statement that marriage was not a fundamental right.
“The court has shamelessly capitulated in the front of a majoritarian and authoritarian executive,” Bhatt said, adding that the judgment would be “rigorously critiqued” and lawyers on the case would be filing for a review petition.
“It is time that queer people come out on the streets, that queer people rage, that we queer people protest,” he said. “Let us be very clear, we are not going to take this sitting down. It might take time but make no mistake: we will get these rights eventually.”