Sierra Pettengill / USA / 2022 / 91’ / English | Italian Subtitles

Welcome to Riotsville, USA, a turning point in American history where the unprecedented protest movements of the late 1960s came into conflict with increasingly militarized police departments. From archival footage shot by the United States military or broadcast on television, director Sierra Pettengill reconstructs the formation of a national consciousness obsessed with maintaining law and order by any means necessary. Focusing on unearthed military training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” where military and police trained to respond to civil disorder, Pettengill shifts our historic gaze from the riots in Chicago, Newark, and Detroit to the forces that aligned against these storied moments of Black rebellion. Dissecting the anatomy of the Kerner Commission, which resulted in an explosive increase in federal funding for police, Riotsville, USAfocuses on the machinations of American institutional control. Amid today’s reckonings on power and state sanctioned violence, the limits of reform, and systemic racism, Pettengill delivers insight from a time similar to our own, urging us to understand how the machine of institutional power manages to rumble on.

ScreenplayTobi Haslett
MusicJace Clayton
Sound design and mix Leandros Ntounis
CastCharlene Modeste (voiceover)
ProducerSara Archambault, Jamila Wignot
Executive producerCharlotte Cook, Michael Y. Chow & Sue Turley, Grace Lay & Sumalee Montano
Archive reasearch Sierra Pettengill
ArchivesABC News/Disney; Getty Images (US); CBS News, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library; National Archives and Records Administration; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; US Government Publishing Office; WTVJ Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives; Miami Dade, WXYZ; Archives of Michigan
Editor Nels Bangerter

Sierra Pettengill

Sierra Pettengill’s work focuses on the warped narratives of the American past. Most recently, she directed the archival short The RiflemanThe Rifleman, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Her 2017 feature-length film, the all-archival documentary The Reagan ShowThe Reagan Show, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival before airing on CNN. She directed the Big Dan Tavernepisode of the Netflix series Trial By Media about the first televised rape trial in the U.S. Her 2018 all-archival short film, Graven ImageGraven Image, aired on POV and is held at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2013 she produced the Academy Award-nominated film Cutie & the Boxerwhich also won an Emmy Award for Best Documentary, and co-directed Town Hall Town Hall about the emergent Tea Party movement, for PBS. She has also worked as an archival researcher for many artists including Jim Jarmusch and Adam Pendleton. She was a Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow, a fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, and is a board member of Screen Slate.