Five years since the movement for George Floyd first took hold worldwide, police killings of Black people in the U.S. continue to scratch record highs. Small-town America, which typically evaded mainstream media coverage, has become a testing ground for new and insidious ways of silencing Black activism. 

In Spa City Revolutionary, Lexis Figuereo, an abolitionist and single father of three, contends with the isolation and pressure of being a Black man and revolutionary activist in rural America—the predominantly white "spa town" of Saratoga Springs, upstate New York. Set squarely against the backdrop of a country reckoning with its violent past and volatile present, a small-town activist leverages a national moment and his fellow organizers to remind everyone that justice starts at the most local of levels, while contending with sinister modes of surveillance that threaten his very livelihood.

Shot over multiple years and drawing on social media documentation from the organizers themselves alongside the police security camera footage surveilling them, Spa City Revolutionary presents a sustained examination of one of upstate New York’s leading abolitionist movements: Saratoga Black Lives Matter, while re-contextualizing these materials as a radical tool of self-representation for and by the group. Saratoga BLM, which comprises like-minded abolitionists, educators, and residents of the town, has repeatedly resisted attempts at capture and brutality by law enforcement, with Lexis Figuereo remaining a target of the FBI.

In daylight, the streets of Saratoga Springs become sites of inspiring protest against state-sanctioned police brutality. By night, the film pans its gaze on urban marginalia, including anachronistic Confederate monuments, street lights, and security camera suffused pavements. Together, this counter-documentation prompts us to pay attention to the inconspicuous. Spa City Revolutionary presents the town as a shifting landscape where structural violence is surveilled and perpetuated, but where justice can also be sought through imagination and direct action.

Roles: Co-director, producer, cinematographer, and editor

To learn more about Saratoga BLM's continued advocacy, visit: https://www.saratogablm.org/

Spa City Revolutionary is seeking additional funding for completion and distribution, has been acquired for streaming on kweliTV, and will be coming soon to a film festival near you.

Press:

‘Spa City Revolutionary’ chronicles rise of Saratoga Springs BLM leader Lexis Figuereo - The Times Union

Accolades:

Finalist, 2022 Blackstar Film Festival Pitch

Hero to some, public enemy to others. 

Indisputably influential.