The film remixes long-form interviews with movement workers across the world who have created community-based safety projects, expanding our ideas about what keeps us safe. We don’t need one answer to how we get free–we need one million experiments.

BACKGROUND

As the movement for collective liberation has intensified its calls for police and prison abolition, the response has demanded that movement workers and radical imaginers offer a single solution to replace carceral responses to harm. We know that, as Mariame Kaba says, there will not be one solution – what we need, and what is already being created, are a million experiments exploring what safety, protection, and accountability can look like in different contexts and communities.

In early 2021, Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization launched 1 Million Experiments, a virtual zine project highlighting projects, initiatives, and programs around the world that were redefining the ways communities create safety and respond to harm. From New Zealand to Oakland to the App Store, these projects show how the work of abolition takes place on every scale and in every space we inhabit.