The new documentary Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round takes its title from Langston Hughes’ 1942 poem about the absurdities of segregation. “On the bus we’re put in the back,” he writes, “But there ain’t no back/ To a merry-go-round!” In the film, the carousel in question was (and is today) a main attraction at the Glen Echo Amusement Park circa 1960. Like numerous recreational facilities across the country at the time, Glen Echo didn’t admit Black people. 

Ain’t No Back takes a deep dive into the efforts to desegregate the local amusement park 65 years ago. Philadelphia-based director Ilana Trachtman’s informative feature, which premiered at the Maryland Film Festival in May, starts the film by contrasting the gaiety of archival footage of the park with the somber recollections of Black children excluded from enjoying it. 

In this early and overlooked chapter of the Civil Rights Movement, an unexpected coalition developed in the summer of 1960 between a group of Howard University students and the White Jewish residents of Bannockburn, Maryland, to protest Glen Echo’s exclusionary practices. The Howard students were coming off victories from sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Arlington. Glen Echo became their next high-profile target. 

When members of the group showed up to protest, they were met by denizens of Bannockburn, a planned community composed largely of Jews and labor union members, who had independently been boycotting the park and pressuring local authorities to desegregate it. Motivated by their experiences with antisemitism, Bannockburn residents brought well-honed union organizing tactics to the picket line. Members of the Black communities neighboring Glen Echo who weren’t allowed into the park also joined the fight. 

For the protestors, a long summer of bonding across racial lines and peaceful picketing ensued. But they also endured American Nazi Party counterprotests and serial arrests (which were challenged in a Supreme Court case), and were occasionally beaten up by a local troublemaker. The protest efforts eventually involved Congress, the NAACP, and then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The following spring, Glen Echo’s owners opened the park to Black people, though they never said publicly what led them to desegregate.

Interviews with a number of the Black and White protestors (now senior citizens) form the narrative backbone of Ain’t No Back. Interviews with Hank Thomas and Dion Diamond from the Howard University group and Esther Delaplaine and Helene Wilson Ageloff, stalwarts of the Bannockburn brigade, are combined with extensive archival photos and film footage (such as vintage 8mm home movies found in an organizer’s basement)—that are a highlight of the documentary. Trachtman, who has worked on previous projects dealing with race and the Jewish faith and whose late father was a Jewish labor organizer, is attentive to the dynamics among (and within) these groups of unlikely allies. 

Detailing the players, the lead-up to the protests, and the unfolding of the summer’s events requires Ain’t No Back to cover a lot of ground. Trachtman and editors Sandra Christie and Ann Collins lean on chapter dividers to help divide blocks of information (“The Students,” “The Leadership Challenge”). Animated sequences in different styles are used to dramatize some scenes that lack visuals, like when the protestors reminisce about their childhoods. Actors Mandy Patinkin, Black Panther’s Dominique Thorne, and D.C. native Jeffrey Wright, among others, stand in as narrators to bring contemporaneous newspaper quotes and protest documents to life. The result is a nuanced but dense exposition that doesn’t quite meld into a stylistically cohesive whole.

Ain’t No Back makes an effective case for recognizing the Glen Echo protests as an exemplar of Black-Jewish allyship and one in the long line of small but impactful actions that made up the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Interracial protests against local segregation practices spread across the country throughout the rest of the decade; Glen Echo was one of the first. For many locals, the 1960 park protests launched lifelong activism in social justice movements (Black Power Movement leader Stokely Carmichael’s first picket line was at Glen Echo). 

While the storytelling of Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round gets slightly bogged down by its impulse to instruct, the lessons derived from the Glen Echo protests surely merit repeating decades later. “When you get together,” 100-year-old Delaplaine reminds us, “you have power.” 

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (documentary, 89 minutes) screens Sept. 15 through 19 at the Edlavitch DC JCC. edcjcc.org. $16.

Thursday through Saturday: The DC History Conference at MLK Library

The 50th annual DC History Conference will offer presentations from historians, journalists, graduate students, and current and former area residents with specialized knowledge on the myriad aspects of D.C. life from the 1700s to the present. Thursday night, April 4, the event kicks off with a discussion on the 1968 uprising following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. between the Atlantic’s senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II and Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas. The two will also discuss the creation and 50th anniversary of 1973’s Home Rule Act. Friday’s diverse schedule includes a talk on enslavement and displacement of Black Americans in Chevy Chase, a look at the 1870s paintings of Rock Creek Park by Jewish immigrant Max Weyl, a narrative on local Black Pride celebrations over the years, and a guide to Aunt Pigeon, a once-enslaved Black Catholic woman who worked for Georgetown Jesuits. Saturday’s equally varied offerings include a panel discussion by those involved in the 1980 creation of the 9:30 Club at its original F Street NW location, moderated by Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye. Additionally, University of Delaware graduate student Alan Parkes will discuss his research on the interrelationship between D.C.’s go-go origins and politics during the late 1970s. Another talk will cover Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom and organized group escapes for others from slavery in the 1800s. The day will also showcase a panel of five Black women who were part of D.C.’s Black feminist movement from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Howard University grad Loretta J. Ross, now a professor at Smith College and a 2022 MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient. The 50th DC History Conference starts at 6 p.m. on April 4 and runs until 6 p.m. on April 6 at MLK Library, 901 G St. NW. conference.dchistory.org. Free. —Steve Kiviat

Friday and Saturday: District Dreamers Film Festival at STABLEarts

The inaugural District Dreamers Film Festival at STABLEarts this weekend is the brainchild of filmmaker and cultural events producer Emmett Ferra, along with STABLEarts’ director Maleke Glee and creative strategist Andrew Williams. The three joined forces last fall to problem-solve a gap in the local film landscape: lively screenings of well-curated works by DMV filmmakers that could both boost their profiles among local audiences and foster connections to the film industry. “This is an area that has a lot of talent,” Ferra tells City Paper. “With District Dreamers, we want to set the precedent that there are stories that are coming out of D.C. and people coming out of D.C. telling them.” The event, scheduled over two half-days, starts with a program of film shorts, including Tribeca Film Festival-premiering Chicken (produced by local entrepreneur David Jack) and post-screening Q&A with its director Josh Leong, that all exemplify, according to Ferra, “what success in indie film looks like.” To assemble the second evening’s film showcase, a selection committee reviewed short films that local filmmakers submitted to the festival’s open call. That lineup, which Ferra describes as “literally watching the fabric of D.C. roll out in front of [you] through storytelling,” ranges from the documentary Federal Stone, which explored why the swimming pool edging material produced by the Virginia-based company of that same name is a favorite of the region’s skateboarders, to the moody dark comedy Mandarins, about an estranged mother and daughter filmed in D.C.’s Chinatown. A series of panels on both days with industry experts—among them Women in Film & Video’s executive director Melissa Houghton and producer of the film DC Noir Kyle David Crosby—will look at behind-the-scenes topics such as financing, distribution, and local impact. The festival’s organizers also intend to create an intimate setting for film-watching and conversation that can’t be found at larger theaters: They’re bringing in Persian rugs (courtesy of Parthia Carpets) to transform the art space into a cozy, off-the-beaten-track micro-cinema, and D.C.’s Blossom Beverages and Lost Generation Brewing Company to supply the libations. The weekend will offer a set of diverse cinematic tales of D.C. that Ferra promises, “builds pride in the city.” District Dreamers Film Festival runs April 5 and 6 at STABLEarts, 336 Randolph Pl. NE. dreamersfilmfest.com. $20 per day. —Coley Gray 

Opens Saturday: Tim Brawner’s Feels Like Heaven at von ammon co.

Omaha-born, New York-based artist Tim Brawner’s first solo exhibit at von ammon co. in Georgetown, Feels Like Heaven, offers a journey into the depths of the grotesque and uncanny. With his large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas, Brawner delves into the darkness of the human psyche, recalling Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal hellscapes and Francis Bacon’s fantastical portraits with screaming mouths. In “Winnie, 2024,” a well-dressed woman with the grayed complexion, wasted skin, and vacant expression of a zombie sits in a fancy restaurant. In other works, there are serpentine hybrid creatures with violet giraffe heads or yawping Medusa faces. In “Thoss, 2024”, a doctor lies prone in a desert, screaming, her skeletal arms stretched ahead. Visceral, surreal, and painted in acidic colors—screaming cobalt, Barbie pink, absinthe green, and livid lavender—faces are distorted, bodies contorted or combined with animal forms, and skin decomposes. But the works are even more unsettling and challenging than that: Some of the faces may be screaming in ecstasy or torture, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” or the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, or, for the ’90s kids, the postapocalyptic distended smiles in Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” music video. The exhibition may be nightmare fuel for some, a confrontation with mortality or an exercise in jouissance for other viewers. Brawner’s technical skill and his themes of alienation, existential dread, and the fragility of the human condition ask us to view his works as a sort of postmodern, fever dream memento mori where the grotesque sublimates into the beautiful. Tim Brawner’s Feels Like Heaven opens April 6 and runs through May 5; an opening reception takes place from noon to 3 p.m. on the April 6 at von ammon co., 3330 Cady’s Alley NW. Saturday and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. www.vonammon.co. Free. —Colleen Kennedy

Saturday and Sunday: Capital Art Book Fair at Eastern Market

If you’re not heading out of town to catch this weekend’s solar eclipse, there’s still an abundance of beauty to behold in D.C. An impressive amount of it will be found densely packed into Eastern Market’s North Hall when the second annual Capital Art Book Fair takes over the space. Organized by East City Art, the two-day event is free and open to the public with the hope of introducing attendees to the wide-ranging and dynamic universe of art books, which are often art themselves. This year’s fair features 34 exhibitors representing more than 100 artists, presses, and designers not just from across the DMV but from around the world. Some of 2023’s inaugural vendors, including audience favorites inner loop press and HOMOCATS, are returning alongside an array of new exhibitors including the Glenstone, Montana State University’s Courier Press, and three international exhibitors. Old and new alike, these exhibitors will sell art, limited-run art books, prints, zines, graphic novels, art magazines, and more. Event organizer and East City Art founding publisher and editor, Phil Hutinet, tells City Paper that the fair is “a feast for the senses, offering a tactile and visual journey through the contemporary and traditional landscapes of art book production.” Attendees are invited to interact and engage with both the fair’s books and also art throughout Capitol Hill. “By organizing this large-scale annual event, the aim is to reestablish Capitol Hill, particularly areas around Eastern Market, as prime destinations for arts and culture. This effort comes at a critical time, given the recent closures of most of the art galleries in the neighborhood due to the pandemic and escalating rents,” says Hutinet. Of course, D.C. is known to most outsiders for its rich museum culture, but residents support an eclectic and robust local art scene, which East City’s fair aims to uplift. Hutinet adds, “In essence, the Capital Art Book Fair is a catalyst for cultural enrichment, economic vitality, and community cohesion. It’s an opportunity to showcase Capitol Hill’s rich cultural fabric, support local businesses, and celebrate the arts in a way that resonates both locally and internationally.” The Capital Art Book Fair runs 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on April 6, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 7 at Eastern Market’s North Hall, 225 7th St. SE. artbookfair.eastcityart.com. Free. —Serena Zets 

Monday: Curtis Sittenfeld on Romantic Comedy via Zoom

Are you in the mood for love? Writer Curtis Sittenfeld sure is as she continues her press tour for Romantic Comedy, one of the hottest books of 2023. The rom-com novel’s much-awaited paperback tour brings Sittenfield to East City Bookshop this week via Zoom where she’ll discuss Romantic Comedy with Elissa Sussman, author of the acclaimed novel Funny You Should Ask. Sittenfeld’s writing captures the neurosis, absurdity, and joys of being a modern woman with incredible specificity and clarity and in Romantic Comedy Sittenfeld is at her best as she writes about Sally Milz, a woman writer on a Saturday Night Live-esque late night show whose skits troll the real-life trend of male comedy writers ending up with gorgeous superstars (a la Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson, Dave McCary and Emma Stone, Pete Davidson and everyone). Sally is thrown off upon finding herself enamored with Noah Brewster, a pop star who comes to host the show. The book weaves sharp cultural commentary on gendered dating realities and expectations into a heartfelt romantic plot that leaves you rooting for Sally whether she ends up with Noah or not. Sittenfeld packed Sixth & I last spring for the book’s initial tour so don’t pass up the opportunity to hear her speak for free. You just might fall in love! Curtis Sittenfeld in conversation with Elissa Sussman starts at 7:30 p.m. on April 8 on Zoom via East City Bookshop. eastcitybookshop.com. Free. —Serena Zets 

Opens Tuesday: Peter Pan at the National Theatre

The classic musical Peter Pan lands at the National Theatre this month for a 12-day run. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and its adaptations have been mainstays of all-ages entertainment for more than a century. Originally staged in 1954 with Mary Martin in the title role, this theatrical adaptation features music by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh, and has proven to be the most popular of tellings. After 70 years, however, the story and show were in desperate need of updates: This all-new production features a revised book by Larissa FastHorse, a Native American playwright who has worked to remove Peter Pan’s incredibly offensive Native stereotypes. Additionally, this production features all the classic songs (including “I Gotta Crow,” “I Won’t Grow Up,” and “Neverland) as well as new songs by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne. Other prominent names on the team include choreographer Lorin Latarro and Emmy Award-winning Lonny Price in the director’s chair. With an intermission, the show’s run time is about 2 hours and 20 minutes and it’s selling out fast. Peter Pan opens April 9 and runs through the April 21 at the National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. broadwayatthenational.com. $59–$139. —Allison Shely 

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to correct the name of the documentary film Federal Stone.

Comedian Lizz Winstead came away from the January 2017 Women’s March exhilarated but chagrined. With Donald Trump newly situated in the White House, the momentum for bold and unapologetic abortion access activism was there. Sustaining a movement, though, requires engaging activists in more than one-off marches. 

That’s when The Daily Show co-creator and former head writer, who founded Abortion Access Front two years earlier in 2015 to destigmatize abortion and promote community organizing for independent clinics and their patients through humor and pop culture, had an out-of-the-box idea. Why not round up a bunch of stand-up comics for a whirlwind tour through cities in the Midwest and South, which are home to many such clinics as well as anti-abortion political agendas? Each show would provide some laughs—and an excuse to convene local advocates and foster support networks for abortion providers where they were needed most. And so the Vagical Mystery Tour was born. “16 shows. 8 weeks. In a van,” Winstead joked with tour audiences. “That’s very ‘Hunger Games’ for your vagina.”

For veteran feminist film director Ruth Leitman, filming the tour began as a “personal lifeline” out of her own Trump administration blues. She planned to follow the group “for a year of inspiration and that would be it,” she tells City Paper. Seven years later, the resulting documentary, No One Asked You, which captures AAF’s humor as an act of rebellious activism while chronicling the deteriorating access to reproductive health care across the country, is premiering in D.C. on Feb. 24 at the 25th annual DC Independent Film Forum. 

Wanting the film to be “a fun movie-going experience,” Leitman leavened the classic road movie format with AAF’s DIY renegade vibe. The film contains plenty of lighthearted-with-an-edge snippets from the comedians’ tour sets, such as Gina Yashere from CBS sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola and Joyelle Nicole Johnson, whose stand-up special, Love Joy, is streaming on Peacock. Musicians Pussy Riot and Neko Case, among others, provide a rocking, on-message feminist soundtrack. 

At each Vagical Mystery tour stop, AAF also offered physical and moral support to local clinics—the comedians painted walls, did landscaping, and threw barbecues for clinic staff. “This is how you party with abortion people. They bring out a gurney and use it as a bar,” Winstead quips at one such gathering captured on film. The opportunity to show the often-silenced abortion providers, staff, and clinic escorts “in their full humanity” was key to Winstead agreeing to be involved in the documentary, she tells City Paper.

As the legislative measures and court decisions that continue to limit abortion access mount, the need for AAF’s creative minds to pump out new content did as well. Over the past five years, AAF has rolled out viral sketch comedy videos calling out the antics of the anti-abortion side, an abortion “telethon” featuring Sarah Silverman, ingenious merch (Abortion Fight Club hoodie, anyone?), and the weekly Feminist Buzzkills podcast. Leitman kept the cameras rolling.

“A lot of documentaries out there aren’t bringing new angles to issues,” Deirdre Evans–Pritchard, DCIFF’s executive director tells City Paper. In her opinion, No One Asked You succeeds in showing that “you can come at the abortion issue with levity … and that really brings more people to the discussion.”

Research backs up Evans-Pritchard’s belief. As Rutgers University professor and co-author of the 2020 book, A Comedian and An Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice, Lauren Feldman, explains, humor defuses “overwhelming and scary” issues such as abortion and climate change, which makes it easier for people to engage. “If you use comedy as a way in, people are more willing to pay attention,” Feldman says. 

DCIFF is an important stop for No One Asked You’s festival run because, as Leitman says, “D.C. is the belly of the beast, politically speaking.” The screening will be followed by an audience discussion with Leitman, Winstead, and Renee Bracey Sherman of the abortion storytelling organization We Testify. The conversation will specifically address the political landscape and opportunities for local activists to get involved in the coming months ahead of and during March 26 when the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments over access to mifepristone, one half of two drugs used to end pregnancies.

Before the March hearing, AAF is spearheading a petition drive demanding the Food and Drug Administration protect access to the drug. The day of the hearings, AAF is recruiting volunteers to rally with their trademark hypocrisy-busting posters on the Court steps. They’re also looking for folks to provide practical support to local abortion clinics to keep them operating without disruption while the political theater plays out on the Hill. 

Winstead hopes that politicians, finally ready to lean in to AAF’s approach, will be among Saturday’s audience members. “Abortion is a winning issue, and it’s activists and the advocates who have centered it effectively,” she says. “The politicians who don’t have a strategy for how to talk about it—hopefully, some will come to the screening and be willing to have a dialogue with those of us who really know how to talk to people about this issue.” 

During this election year, the filmmakers and AAF are fundraising to hold as many community screenings and discussions as possible. They plan to return to a number of the original Vagical Mystery Tour stops, several of which are in states with ballot measures against and for reproductive rights. (This includes Maryland’s proposed state constitutional amendment to establish the right to make “decisions to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy.”) The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Leitman is based, and college campuses are other priorities. 

This is all part of AAF’s strategy to not only provide easy on-ramps to activism but to also sustain engagement. Winstead is also optimistic after witnessing the impact of AAF’s irreverent humor paired with serious direct action. “The structures that are in place are scary and they’re doing really scary things to limit access to abortion care,” she says. “But knowing that how we [at AAF] communicate gets people off their asses and that they have found a place for themselves in the [abortion] movement is why I have hope.”

No One Asked You screens at 6 p.m. on Feb. 24 at Regal Chinatown Theaters, followed by a panel discussion with the film’s director Ruth Leitman, star Lizz Winstead, and other guests, as part of the DC Independent Film Forum. A second screening takes place at 3 p.m. on Feb. 25 at Regal. dciff-indie.org. $14.

The 25th Annual DCIFF runs through Feb. 25 in theaters across the city. dciff-indie.org.

The March on Washington Film Festival’s artistic director, Isisara Bey, has a vision for this year’s festival program. “What I want to show in the festival is how people took their inspiration and motivation from the civil rights era,” she says, “and turned it into action.” 

Now in its 11th edition, MOWFF was founded in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the landmark 1963 civil rights demonstration from which the fest took its name, with the goal of keeping the march relevant to 21st-century audiences. “The festival’s purpose is to unearth the myths told and untold or silenced stories of the civil rights movement and tie that to contemporary activism,” Bey says.

This year’s theme, Pulpits, Protest, and Power: The Church & the Civil Rights Movement, was inspired by Bey and festival founder Robert Raben’s appreciation for the Black church’s role as a safe haven, source of hope, and rallying point in civil rights activism. 

While a slate of films anchor the festival, the event has evolved into a multi-disciplinary celebration of song, dance, DJing, and conversation that weaves together Black politics, faith, community organizing, and cultural traditions. “We have a kinesthetic connection, a cultural connection, a spiritual connection to the arts” says Bey. “I wanted that to be part of the festival.”

Held annually, the 2023 MOWFF began its 10-day run on Sept. 24 with a screening of After Sherman. In this personal documentary, director Jon Sesrie Goff journeys through the Gullah community along the coastal U.S. South, exploring how a history of racial exclusion fostered unique enclaves for Black families; now their connection to this land is under threat from outside developers. The institution of the Black church, he shows, forms a continuous chain of solidarity and resistance for the community dating from the Civil War through the civil rights era to the modern-day activism of Goff’s own pastor father.       

The screening was followed by an “afternoon soiree” with artists who connected their Gullah identity with both their artistic practice and their advocacy. The event ended with a participatory “ring shout” of singing and shuffling counterclockwise in a circle common to the region’s church services. 

Free upcoming screenings include documentaries Little Richard: I Am Everything (Sept. 28) and The Space Race (Oct. 1). While entertainer Little Richard lived much of his life in the public eye, the film reveals his lesser-known efforts to integrate the disparate elements of his identity—his queerness, his faith, and his music. The outdoor screening at Union Market’s Hi-Lawn will be preceded by a rock ’n’ roll DJ with plenty of room to dance, says Bey. 

Lisa Cortés and Diego Hurtado’s documentary The Space Race profiles the pioneering Black pilots, scientists, and engineers at NASA. The film, screening at Eaton Hotel, focuses on the years 1963 up through today’s Black Lives Matter movement in a quest for racial equality and recognition on Earth as much as in space.

MOWFF’s on-demand virtual film program, which runs through Oct. 1, offers several documentary portraits of civil rights era spiritual leaders such as Howard Thurman (Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story), whose theology of radical nonviolence shaped the civil rights movement. The still active and iconic firebrand activist Rev. Al Sharpton is also featured in Loudmouth.

The festival’s intentional blending of entertainment and education is evident in its Pulpits, Protest and Power centerpiece event that takes place Saturday at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The three theologians presenting at the event, each speaking about different generations of faith activism, will be joined by hip-hop dancers, gospel recording artist Yolanda Adams, and the school’s choir.

An award ceremony for the festival’s student and emerging filmmaker competition will also take place at the event. (The competition’s short films can be seen at a free screening earlier that day at Eaton Workshop.) 

One of the films in competition, On Language, is directed by 23-year-old film student and Ward 7 resident Cameron Joy Gray. Her short draws a line from her experiences with language code switching and expectations about educational attainment to notions of racial identity and assimilation passed down through her mother, grandmother, and previous generations who migrated to D.C. from the segregated South.  

The lessons of the civil rights era are still relevant to her Gen Z peers, Gray tells City Paper. “What’s really interesting to me about this year’s [festival] theme, and that really connects to me and also to my generation is the power of advocacy,” she says. “I think we have so much to learn about the power of our voice even when it feels like we don’t have any power.” 

Gray’s taking from the past to inform the present perspective is exactly what Bey hopes will be the impact not only of the March on Washington Film Festival but also the ongoing struggle for racial justice: “I want people to see that this is a continuum,” offers Bey. “It’s not a sprint. It’s a multi-generational marathon.”

The March on Washington Film Festival runs through Oct. 1. marchonwashingtonfilmfestival.org. $20–$500.