On the Battlefield
The first release by Little Egypt Collective stages a sound recordist reconnecting with the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts – the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois.
Appearing from under a large and noisy flock of sparrows, a Black man walks around a vacant lot with a boom in his hand. He wears headphones: he’s a sound recordist, and he’s listening—people are speaking to him. They speak from underneath the vacant lot, where a piece of history lies buried. For half a century, this lot was home to rows of social housing, along with a significant chapter of African-American history. The city, which stretches along the Mississippi River and bears the same name as the capital of Egypt (Cairo), stood on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. What is left of it is what is left of most American cities bound to this past: ruins, defunct, ivy-ridden buildings, bankruptcy as an ultimate punishment, one more resurgence of segregation. Amid this shameful silence, On the Battlefield listens carefully, halfway between a field recording and a séance. With the help of the sound recordist, it tunes in to the history that rises up in the murmur of ghosts and in the song that inspired the title of the film, reminding us that behind every vacant lot lies a battlefield.
Jérôme Momcilovic
Ray Whitaker (filmmaker, director, writer, sound recordist, line producer, and cinematographer) is an emerging artist in Cairo who trained as a concrete worker with his grandfather. Since 2017, he has been a leading member of Little Egypt Productions, and has worked with Cairo youth to enhance their skills in filmmaking and acting and expand creative horizons.
J.P. Sniadecki (filmmaker, director, writer, producer, editor, cinematographer, sound) works between China and the US as a filmmaker-anthropologist who has directed six feature-length films which have screened at festivals such as Berlin, BFI London, IDFA, Locarno, New York, AFI, Mar del Plata, HotDocs, and Hong Kong.
Lisa Marie Malloy (director, co-writer, producer) is a filmmaker who embraces cinema’s potential for collective world-building. Her first feature film A Shape of Things to Come (2020) has shown at venues around the world. Her second film, The Raw and the Cooked (2022), produced in collaboration with an Indigenous Amis family in Taiwan, was in the Cinéma du réel 2022 competition.
Theresa Delsoin (producer, director, writer, actress) is a Cairo resident and artist who serves the community through her work as an author of four books, a member of Little Egypt Productions, and a teacher at Emerson elementary. Her passion is to tell transformative stories through writing and filming, and to connect Cairo youth with their beautiful environment, their powerful history, and their full creative potential.
Little Egypt Productions
Lisa Marie Malloy, JP Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker
Homer Mora Acosta, Lisa Marie Malloy, JP Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker
Lisa Marie Malloy, JP Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker
Little Egypt Productions - lmm324@cornell.edu
