Adamu Chan's What These Walls Won't Hold

Adamu Taye Chan is excited to premiere the screening of the film What These Walls Won’t Hold, by Bay Area filmmaker Adamu Chan. Help raise funds for editing, color, sound, and an impact campaign. Be a part of bringing this important story to the world. 

Film synopsis: The COVID-19 crisis inside California prisons has claimed the lives of over 200 incarcerated people and infected tens of thousands more. This film tracks the origins of COVID-19 inside the California state prison system and a newly formed coalition, led by currently and formerly incarcerated people, that brought forward an abolitionist framework to a life or death situation. Told through the lens and perspective of filmmaker Adamu Chan, who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, What These Walls Won’t Hold explores how relationships, built on trust, shared liberatory struggle, and connections across broader abolitionist organizing work, can unfold into sites of resistance and radical change, across prison walls and beyond separations of power, essential to actualizing the world impacted communities are fighting to create.

About Adamu: Adamu Chan is a filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. He produced numerous short films while incarcerated, using his vantage point and experience as an incarcerated person as a lens to focus the viewer’s gaze on issues related to social justice. In 2021, he was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films to produce and direct his film What These Walls Won't Hold. Adamu draws inspiration and energy from the voices of those directly impacted, and seeks to empower them to reshape the narratives that have been created about them through film.