Fight Hate With Love
Help fund a film and bring one activist’s message of love and healing to screens worldwide
After I spent a confusing 24 hours in a jail in Chinatown, I began to ask some questions about why the prison system worked the way it did. Why was I treated like an animal? Why was everyone in the cell with me black? And how could this system possibly be helping society?
The more I learned about the system, the more angry I became, and the closer I knew I was to starting a film. As I learned about the intersection of race, class, addiction, and the criminal justice system, I became hopeless about what — if anything — could be done towards reform. Although the problem of mass incarceration has been evident for over forty years, the mainstream media only increased reporting on its brutal consequences in the past few years. The daily news confirmed a narrative — that mass incarceration is revelatory stain on our country’s legacy.
But there is only so much one can do with that awareness. To move beyond the despair, I needed to find the heroes of the movement; people who had been directly impacted by incarceration and were now in a position to do something to change the system.
That’s when I met Michael “OG Law” Tabon.
In meeting Michael, I saw not only a hero with a community based solution, but a sensitive family man and an artist. I believed his story could be a symbol for an outlook of constructive social change, so I started following him with a camera immediately.
Like one out of three men in his community, Michael has been caught in the revolving door of the prison system since he was sixteen years old. Incarceration became a way of life, seen as an inherited destiny, until he had a revelation — that he could break the cycle of the womb to prison pipeline gripping marginalized communities across black America.
‘To move beyond the despair, you need to find the heroes of the movement.’
And so was born his cause, Fight Hate with Love, a one-man prison and premature death prevention power movement. Michael fights so that his son, and all the other little boys in his community, can live a ‘regular life’, something he says is impossible in a country where a boy can be shot for being black. In Michael’s eyes, it will take a supernatural strength, a love of community and a love of self that is stronger than the systematic traps that lead to death and confinement, to save the next generation.
As the Director of Photography for MediaStorm, I knew we had an incredible opportunity to bring all the talents and resources of this company to bear on this timely story. As a result, today we’re in the final stretches of finishing MediaStorm’s first original film, Fight Hate with Love.
Fight Hate with Love is a film about the incredible struggle and often desperate reality of rebuilding a life and coming together as a family after a period of incarceration. It’s a film about what we lose, what we value, and what we pass down between generations when we make incarceration the norm in Black America.
We’ve learned a lot while making this film. In the past year, we’ve seen first hand the psychological, social, and economic impacts of the twin pillars of racial injustice and incarceration. As the story unraveled, Michael’s journey became both more inspiring and more distressing than we could have imagined.
For Michael, the only way to move forward in a post-prison reality is through healing and helping others. But it’s hard to heal and help others when the wound within is so evident. In Fight Hate with Love, we see how the wounds and traumas of Michael’s experiences play out in his family, his community, and his work.
We believe strongly that storytelling plays an important role in healing. The traumas suffered by incarcerated people have become part of our trauma as a society, and until we recognize our need for cultural healing, this story, and stories like it must be brought to the fore.
MediaStorm and I are currently raising funds through Kickstarter to help make Fight Hate with Love a reality. Your support will enable us to do just that.
