Special Screening: Alice Street
Past Event
Join us for a free screening of the documentary film, Alice Street, with a presentation and Q&A by film makers Spencer Wilkinson, and artist Desi Mundo. Alice Street documents the power of art to unite communities, and the power of gentrification to strip them.
Synopsis: Two Oakland artists, Pancho Peskador, a Chilean studio painter, and Desi Mundo, a Chicago-born aerosol artist, form an unlikely partnership to tackle their most ambitious project to date: a four-story mural in the heart of downtown Oakland. Their site is situated at a unique intersection where Chinese and Afro-Diasporic communities face the imminent threat of displacement and gentrification As the mural takes shape on the wall, Oakland’s unique cultural legacies come to life through historical flashbacks. Past exclusionary policies replay themselves in the present as gentrification threatens to uproot long-term residents.
Three months later, news comes that another forthcoming condominium development will obscure the mural, which has become a source of neighborhood pride. Despite last-ditch opposition to the condominium, it receives city approval, effectively dooming the mural.
SPENCER WILKINSON – DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER
Spencer Wilkinson is the founder of Endangered Ideas, a production company based in Oakland, California. Spencer directed the feature-length ONE VOICE: The Story of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir (2018), which premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival, was featured on the PBS NewsHour’s ‘Brief But Spectacular’ series, one of East Bay Express’ Top Movies of 2018 and selected by the 2020 Truly CA series on KQED. Spencer directed Alice Street (2020) which premiered at Newport Beach Film Festival. After ten years of working in disenfranchised communities focused on supporting gang-involved youth, Spencer began a career in community media and documentary filmmaking.
DESI MUNDO-MURALIST
Desi Mundo is an Oakland-based spray paint educator, hip-hop cultural diplomat, and the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project, a pavement-to-policy mural organization that has produced more than 250 murals, throughout the Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally. His largest mural, the “Universal Language” galvanized the Oakland community in the struggle against gentrification, resulting in $20 million in community benefits, as chronicled in the feature documentary film Alice Street, that he co-produced. Desi’s legacy as an educator and youth worker in K-12 schools spans two decades