“Coming to you, for you, and about you…” tells the story of The Urban Scene, a public affairs cable access program that aired in Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s. The show offered news and perspectives of Black life in Columbus not covered by mainstream media. Episodes surveyed a wide range of topics, including South African apartheid, new visions for Black arts, racial disparities in education, justice in Columbus, and the state of Black mental health. Between 1982-1986 the show’s producers taped and aired over 200 episodes. Currently what survives of The Urban Scene is a small archive of 22 episodes. 22 episodes that beg questions about an uncertain, yet hopeful future. What futures, for example, did the creators of The Urban Scene imagine for themselves, for their families, and for the Black community in Columbus and across the country? “Coming to you, for you, and about you…” is an experimental documentary film that weaves together archival footage, oral histories, and enactments to look back into already-dreamt-of futures to ask what became of them–and–what systems of power and limitations of public imagination stood in the way of their becoming.

About The Team

Alexis McCrimmon is a filmmaker and film editor from the Midwestern United States. Her non-fiction and experimental films explore geographies of power, hauntological subjects, and the linkages between material culture and ritual practice. Her work has been screened at numerous national and international film festivals and cultural institutions such as Frameline, Athens International Film + Video Festival, AntiMatter [Media Art], Prismatic Ground, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Seattle Art Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She received her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, in Philadelphia PA. McCrimmon currently works as a full-time editor in the Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Studio Residency Program.