The Auntie Sewing Squad Resistance Playbook

Filmmakers in attendance. Film program will be followed by Q&A.

THE AUNTIE SEWING SQUAD RESISTANCE PLAYBOOK is a feature-length documentary that follows the Auntie Sewing Squad, a collective of mostly BIPOC women volunteers who saved the world at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the start of the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020 in the U.S., due to the Trump administration’s botched response to the pandemic, the bottom dropped out of the surgical facemask supply as healthcare workers scrambled for PPE. From this chaos the Auntie Sewing Squad emerged, when performance artist Kristina Wong created the Auntie Sewing Squad facebook group in mid-March 2020.

The Aunties came together with a mission: to protect vulnerable communities from COVID-19. This national network of hundreds of Aunties, Uncles, and non-binary volunteers turned their living rooms into “sweatshops,” where they sewed and donated cloth facemasks to counter the US government’s failure to provide protective gear for its people.

For the Aunties, sewing and donating masks was not just about meeting a public health need, it was a way to address systemic inequities from their sewing machines, by openly discussing feminism, anti-racism, allyship, and destroying white supremacy.

Credits
Writer: Valerie Soe, Corey Ohama
Producer: Valerie Soe, Lila Yomtoob
Director of Photography: Kevin Castro
Editor: Corey Ohama
Sound Designer: David Sandwisch
VFX Designer: Rex Liu