A short work-in-progress documentary film sample: Sign My Name To Freedom

Sign My Name to Freedom: The Lost Music of Betty Reid Soskin

Director: Bryan Gibel | Co-Director: AK Sandhu

Join local filmmaker Bryan Gibel and members of the film team at the West Oakland Branch of the Oakland Public Library for a FREE work-in-progress documentary film sample of “,” a feature documentary about iconic National Park Ranger Betty Reid Soskin, her hidden life as a singer-songwriter, and her family’s experiences confronting Jim Crow-style segregation on the West Coast. This will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with Director Bryan Gibel, Outreach Producer Stephisha Ycoy-Walton, a West Oakland Librarian representative, and special guest Photographer Henry Raulston, who is celebrated for his incredible photographic documentation of the Black Panther Movement.

Betty gained fame as the oldest Park Ranger in the country after starting that job at the age of 85, and she continued working at the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Site as an interpretive oral historian until she retired at 100. Through her experience as a WWII file clerk for an all-black union auxiliary in Richmond, she helped to reshape the national narrative about home front segregation in the workplace, labor unions, and in the armed forces.

The documentary takes Betty’s work for the Park Service as its jumping off point, and then it explores lesser-known aspects of her personal story, focusing in large part on her family’s role as the first African Americans to cross the color line into Walnut Creek, and her hidden life as a singer/songwriter in the years that followed. The film also looks at Betty’s journey in her 90s to reexplore the music she left behind fifty years earlier and her collaborations with younger musicians to give her songs life again.

The film team is currently raising funds to complete the documentary while Betty is still with us to experience it, which she very much hopes can happen. Their goal is to finish the film by 2025. Although Betty is doing well at 103, the clock is ticking.

Pictured above (top to bottom): Film Director/Producer Bryan Gibel, Co-Producer and Social Media Manager Alyana Reid, Outreach Producer Stephisha Walton, Photographer Henry Raulston.

Host or Publisher Sign My Name To Freedom