98 Days is a hybrid documentary tracing activist-filmmaker RJ Dawson’s journey from the 2020 Grand Park occupation, where Black Unity organizers and unhoused residents clashed with police and internal divisions to his current work with the Center of Independent Living Storytellers Initiative, a disability justice media project. The film contrasts the sacrifices of street protests with today’s accessible resistance tactics, asking how movements can wield narrative power without replicating trauma. At its heart, it’s a story about who controls the camera and whether marginalized communities can televise their revolution without being consumed by it.

98 Days: A Hybrid Documentary of Resistance and Reckoning

In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, Los Angeles became a nexus of protest and possibility. At Grand Park, just outside City Hall, activists and unhoused individuals formed a protest encampment that lasted 98 days. 98 Days examines this moment as a case study in the promise and pitfalls of modern activism. It explores how grassroots resistance intersects with systemic oppression, especially in the context of Black and Indigenous communities facing compounded marginalization through homelessness, policing, and historical erasure.

This hybrid documentary that weaves together vérité footage, re-enactments, and experimental storytelling to trace the evolution of protest movements across two defining moments: the 2020 Black Unity occupation of Grand Park and the 2025 disability justice uprising. At its core, the film follows filmmaker and activist RJ Dawson, whose intimate footage from the 98-day occupation serves as both a historical record and a personal testimony. Alongside the director, RJ’s creative and life partner, they emerge as pivotal architects of the Storytellers Initiative, a radical media project born from the urgent need to document and amplify disability-led protests in the face of escalating attacks on healthcare access, including the erosion of Roe v. Wade and threats to Medicare and Medicaid.

The film unfolds through three interwoven narratives. The first immerses viewers in the 2020 Grand Park occupation, where RJ and Black Unity organizers, a radical collective rejecting mainstream BLM’s compromises, attempted to build an autonomous zone amidst police surveillance and internal fractures. Their revolutionary optimism is tempered by clashes over strategy and the harsh realities of sustaining an encampment that included unhoused residents with immediate survival needs. This section culminates in the violent police raid that scattered the movement, leaving behind unanswered questions: Could disability justice principles have preserved their momentum? What became of those who disappeared in the raid’s aftermath?  In parallel, the film documents the 2025 disability justice movement through the work of the Storytellers Initiative, co-founded by RJ and the director, Cashmere Jasmine, with the CIL to respond to the current political climate’s assaults on bodily autonomy and healthcare access. The Initiative’s work raises urgent questions about whether innovative tactics can secure policy change or simply create better documentation of resistance in the face of systemic oppression. Historical threads bind these narratives together, with an archive of Ed Roberts’ 1960s activism and the legacy of Brad Lomax, the Black Panther who bridged civil rights and disability justice. Then we will examine the Midterm Elections to test the effects of accessible organization in the short term.  These moments are not mere footnotes but active conversations with the present, challenging movements to learn from past alliances and omissions.

98 Days confronts its audience with unresolved questions: In an era of performative allyship, what does meaningful safety look like? Can movements survive without martyrs or million-dollar budgets? And how do we honor struggle without reducing it to spectacle? The film interrogates the performance of protest in the digital age: how visibility, virality, and symbolic gestures often overshadow the hard, slow work of organizing. The film poses urgent questions: What makes a movement succeed or fail? How do race, media, mental health, and power complicate collective resistance? And what is the personal cost of being caught between revolutionary hope and political paralysis? By centering RJ and the director’s dual roles as both chroniclers and participants, the film becomes more than a documentary—it’s a living experiment in how to fight, fail, and persist. The revolution will indeed be televised, but as the Storytellers Initiative insists: only if the marginalized hold the cameras.