Dispatch 09

THANK YOU ALL SO VERY MUCH

Jul 02, 2026

Welcome to The Strata, a bi-weekly newsletter that tells a serialized story about my filmmaking process and updates you on the Impact Campaign for my first feature film.

THANK YOU ALL SO VERY MUCH

We are so grateful to everyone who came to see Flood on the big screen at DCTV and the Jacob Burns Film Center! You are incredible! Keep reading + follow @flooddoc to see more images from our theatrical run and impact campaign launch.

Snapshots from our DCTV premiere week with doc stars + Q&A moderators Laura Poitras & Yance Ford

Dispatch 09: PARADIGM SHIFT

If you are new to THE STRATA, welcome! You can catch up on all of our serialized storytelling here.

Last time, we took a brief intermission to announce our US theatrical premiere. Today, we continue the story from Dispatch 07, which ended with me putting a mic on my dad and following him to work.

It’s 8AM, and three dozen sleepy nine-year-olds sit up long enough to croak “Here” during roll call. My dad reads the roster. He’s at the start of his 25th, and final, year of teaching public elementary school.

I peer through my lens at the walls pinned with student work: a hand-drawn poster proclaiming HARD IS GOOD, illustrations of crocodile-bird symbiosis, various rocks. I make a mental note to film any geology lessons, as I am curious about how my dad handles geologic time and evolution, both of which he privately rejects.

I notice the students listening with rapt attention. Dad is teaching a math lesson.

“I saw people put the two up there, but then they didn’t add the two to their answer. It’s a tiny mistake, but tiny mistakes are kind of like a high dive. You jump off, you’re a hundred feet in the air…you’ve gotta hit the little bowl of water down there...”

He whistles a downward pitch, then makes a “SPLAT!” that sends students cackling. “You were so close! But you’re dead.” Everyone’s awake now. Everyone’s excited.

He divides the class into groups to conduct lab experiments. He joins a group that is guessing the number of water droplets needed to fill graduated cylinders.

“If it turns out that your prediction is wrong, is that bad science?” The students shake their heads no. “Nah. We make predictions all the time. And then we correct as we do our experiment and get a better sense of what’s right.”

When I was nine, my father could raise the hair on the back of my neck simply by entering a room, he was so mercurial. He had two modes — thrilling and terrifying — depending on factors I could neither control nor understand. The most salient thing he taught me about science was that our family did not believe in evolution.

But here, in the classroom, he is inspiring, beloved, and respected. Kids line up for hugs after class. “I love you to death!” he tells them as they skip away. I gotta say: I kinda like Mr. Scoggin.

I ask him about evolution on the drive home. “Do you teach it?”

“I would,” he says, “because it’s an important theory, and I think it should be taught. The only reason I don’t is that it’s not in the curriculum.”

I don’t press him on it; I know what his beliefs are, and now that we’re talking again, now that we’re sitting in the car together, I have less appetite for disagreement. I’m enjoying the peace.

It lasts until we get home to my parents’ house.

To be continued in the next dispatch.

16 screenings + 8 Q&As = IMPACT

“While the film served as a catalyst to reflect on my own family dynamics and the ways they’ve evolved over time, it’s been the conversations that have happened afterward that have led to what I would call a life-changing experience.”
-Sarah Carr, Financial Therapist & Board President of Reclamation Collective

During our qualifying run at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema + screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center, we hosted eight conversations about bridging divides in our main focus areas: family estrangement, religious + ideological differences, and political divides.

Participants included Sarah Carr and therapists Kristen Rix and Dr. Joshua Stieber from Reclamation Collective, April Kunis from Pause for America, Brian Felder from Braver Angels, Ryan Ayin from The Liberati, Charles King from Housing Works, composer Stuart Bogie, and filmmakers Laura Poitras, Macky Alston, and Yance Ford.