Accept & Embrace

dir. Cameron Geeding
2022
Running time: 21 min.

Film

46 Years chronicles the Nation of Islam, an unsolved murder in 1967, a man who had to grow up without a father and a man who had to live with the guilt of his brother’s death for almost five decades. The filmmaker grew up with broken and contradictory accounts of her grandfather’s murder, the stories scattered across states and generations. In 46 Years, she attempts to glue the pieces together and unearth the truth of an event that rocked a family and the Black Muslim community across America.

In a Central Florida retirement park, the residents of Buttonwood Bay navigate tropical storms and an ever-aging population as they act in defiance of what seems to always linger over them: death. Here lives Noreen and her sister Sharon as they spend the remainder of their idyllic lives in this tight-knit community of merriment. Accept & Embrace demonstrates the process of transitioning from an observational to reflexive style as the filmmaker is forced to confront his relation to the film’s central participant, his grandmother, and how the nature of his photography might intrude on this community of wisdom and embracement.

Cameron Geeding

Raised in Raytown, Missouri, Cameron Geeding is a student of the Murray Center with a particular interest in post-production. He studies Documentary Journalism at Mizzou and is graduating in the spring of 2022. During his time as a student, Geeding was a pre-screener for the International Documentary Association. Geeding served as the editor for Mark Power’s short film Mavericks and screened an early cut of his own film, Accept & Embrace, at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. Following graduation, he hopes to find opportunities to further his interest in the process of post-production and collaborative filmmaking.