OPERATION: WE PRACTICED FREEDOM
‘‘Democracy dies in a vote’’
Head Huncho’s Call to Action
(Teaser)
Operation: We Practiced Freedom is a psychological short-film war drama that examines revolution as a collision of competing ideologies, held together by violence and language.
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Story:
During a civil war, three rebels from the Southern Resistance of Justice are tasked with extracting a high-value scientist. The rebels begin to fracture when a routine interrogation forces them to confront the gap between their beliefs and their actions.
Artistic Statement
Operation: We Practiced Freedom began in 2023 under the working title Internet Rebels. At the time, it was a haphazard attempt to write a feature inspired by Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1955). I wanted to make something low-budget that I could shoot outside in natural light with exciting visuals and a modern, “I’m a nigga,” twist on it. It wasn’t good; I couldn’t sink my teeth into the material, and I didn’t make it past ten pages. I never went beyond that, and I hated it and then abandoned it.
Three years later, after hearing disappointing news about an entirely different project, I ended up revisiting scripts I had written before. Then there it was, all the way at the bottom of the list: Internet Rebels. As the script loaded, I greeted it with the same fondness one would have for a former summer fling, and suddenly I loved it. Her skin was radiant; she smelled different; her style had matured; her voice was more confident. Yet the biggest difference was that I’ve grown. I found myself laughing at jokes I would have frowned at years earlier. Forgetting choices I made and simply enjoying the work. The past has a way of reminding you of things that you didn’t know you knew.
REBELS started with my obsession with language and the online debasement of regional culture. More accurately put, the bastardization of Black American language, as it is told from the mouths of people who think ‘’to crash out " is ‘’to yell loudly ".
Words and phrases that once carried communal weight and cultural specificity now circulate online, detached from history, flattened into a performance of connection. Though this short film is not literally about language or the performance of language, that obsession served as a bridge to something bigger and more timely: the performance of rebellion itself.
Just as language online has been stripped away from the communities that shaped it, the politics and suffering of revolutions have also been reduced to fashionable aesthetics to be performed, reposted, and embodied without true connection. Resistance has been commodified and sold on the social media marketplace as an image, a posture, a sound, a brand, an identity, and a badge of public acceptance. One can even wander down the narrow hallways of online academia and wonder whether the endless discourse on resistance as theory versus actionable steps intentionally maintains a healthy hedonistic gap between the two. The lived realities of class struggle, community safety, and personal survival are often smushed under the inflatable spectacle of tricky words.
Operation: We Practiced Freedom is my attempt to wrestle with that contradiction, my own contradictions. This short film will not answer every question I have, you have, or anyone else has, but it is the beginning of a larger conversation that has been whispering to me for years.
I’m shooting the film on Super 16 because, to me, film, the medium itself, is rebellious. Photography taught me how to see, how to craft, and motion picture film has always been the medium I dreamed of working in. I believe in the texture of film, the intentionality it demands, and the way it renders human skin, the luminosity, and latitude. Shooting on film feels rebellious because, unlike the holy trinity of instant gratification, convenience, and endless coverage, in this digital age, this process, the motion film process, requires discipline, patience, trust, and commitment. It strips away the bells and whistles and gets to the core of filmmaking. Image & Sound.
Given our limited resources, the process itself mirrors the guerrilla spirit of the story we are telling. Everyone involved is required to work with precision and resolve. There’s no room for waste. That pressure bakes into the acetate, becoming a part of the visual language and overall feel.
More than anything, Operation: We Practiced Freedom isn't the beginning of my lifelong commitment to celluloid; I’ve been shooting film for a few years now, but it does mark growth in my life’s journey of making not only cinema but art rooted in intentional image-making, language, contradiction, memory, performance, and lived experience.
Thank you all for reading! Join the rebellion!
Artist Bio
Troy C. Johnson is a filmmaker, photographer, and theatre artist born and raised in Washington, D.C. Rooted in inner-city vernacular and informed by his work in photography and the visual medium, his practice explores Black interior life, performance, mythology, faith, and the unstable relationship between freedom and power. Through photography and motion-picture film, Johnson seeks to create visual narratives that merge theatrical sensibilities, historical scholarship, and contemporary social realities. His photography has been exhibited throughout Washington, D.C., Maryland, and New York City, and he is a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities FY26 Media Arts Fellowship. His theatrical credits include assistant directing Wipeout at Studio Theatre, The Dragon at Spooky Action Theatre, and Secret in the Wings at The Theatre Lab, alongside extensive behind-the-scenes work as a carpenter, electrician, props technician, and assistant stage manager throughout the D.C. theatre community, including but not limited to, Arena Stage, Studio Theatre, Mosaic Theater Company, Keegan Theatre, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
THE CAST
Brinden Banks
Avan Martin
Eleanor Parks
I met all of my actors through the stage, and because we all share the language of the stage and that process. We will have weeks and weeks of rehearsal. One, to ensure that we fine-tune our desires, secrets, motivations, and choices before we even get the camera rolling and make sure we are telling the right story. Two, the medium of our choice, film, requires either an ignorant amount of money to bankroll a bizillion takes or a healthy amount of deep concentration to operate on such a low budget. Or a 3rd option, which is never really an option but, in fact, happens: tell an incoherent story.
When working with actors who primarily work on stage in front of a live audience. The process of fleshing out characters, forming repeatable yet honest choices, and knowing your lines is the price of admission to be taken seriously in this profession. Working with and watching some of the best actors in town, and sitting in rooms with some of the best and most innate storytellers, has given me the tools to bring a story of such contradiction, nuance, and boldness to life.
Though among the many strengths and benefits that will come with working with such dedicated craftsmen of performance, there are some challenges that we will come across, as with any production.
One challenge that I look forward to wrestling with is striking a balance between the theatrical and the natural (that rhymes lol). When should it be more realistic, and when does it make sense to do too much? In the overarching theme, I think this spectrum sits comfortably with how we use language, how we talk about bettering our societies, and how we criticize others. I plan for this (word escaping me) to be conveyed in the feeling of this short film.