The first film
60 Years and Still (2020)
60 Years and Still is the film that set the pattern. It is a short animated documentary about police violence against Black Americans from the 1960s to 2020, made in under a month.
According to Frizzifrizzi, the film was produced between 3 and 30 June 2020, during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. It used the approach Centuries and Still later repeated: hand-made paper scenery mixed with video footage and archival audio, and a team of collaborators rather than a single animator.
When anti-Asian attacks rose in 2020 and 2021, Tran applied the same structure to a longer history. The title of Centuries and Still answers the first film's title: the first spans sixty years, the second a century and a half. Several publications, including Film Shortage and Lester Banks, introduced the second film by pointing to the first.
Context for the 1960s–2020 span
A sixty-year window starting in 1960 covers the civil rights movement and the 1967 unrest in Detroit and Newark. The Kerner Commission report followed in 1968, and later cases became national news through video, from Rodney King in 1991 to 2020. Readers who want the documentary record should start with the National Archives' civil rights resources and the Library of Congress Civil Rights History Project.