INDY March 19, 2025

March 19, 2025

True Stories

By Sarah Edwards, p.22

In its 27th year, Durham's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival continues to elevate eye-opening stories of the world around us. In a fraught political climate, the event feels more urgent than ever.

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

Contents

5 The Trump administration canceled a grant program that brought 133 teachers to Wake County schools that needed them most. BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL

6 Durham city council members hope to keep bus service fare-free. But making the math work is more complicated this year. BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW

8 The revamped Wheels skating rink looks like a childhood memory, with the DJ playing Missy Elliott. But everything, down to the smell, is new. BY LENA GELLER

10 Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools is searching for its next superintendent and taking public input. BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR

11 How the North Carolina Association of Educators grew its local membership and scored major electoral wins. BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW

14 After a Durham immigrant family endured violence, community organizations stepped in to support them. Now, those groups are under threat due to federal funding cuts. BY LENA GELLER

CAMP GUIDE

17 It's time to start thinking about summer camp. Whatever your child's interests, our 2025 Summer Camp Guide offers plenty of options.

CULTURE

22 “When we can hold real people up in that sort of light—that feels really meaningful to me,” says Sadie Tillery, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival's artistic and festival co-director. BY SARAH EDWARDS

24 Five documentaries to catch at this year's Full Frame. BY SARAH EDWARDS

26 Talking with Durham author Adam Sobsey about his elegant, searching new memoir, A Jewish Appendix BY LENA GELLER

THE REGULARS

3 Backtalk 4 Op-ed 30 Culture calendar

COVER Sadie Tillery and Emily Foster, the co-festival directors of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, pose for a portrait at the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham. PHOTO BY

Publisher

John Hurld

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief

Sarah Willets

Raleigh

Jane Porter

Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Lena Geller

Justin Laidlaw

Chase Pellegrini de Paur

Report For America Corps Reporter

Chloe Courtney Bohl

Contributors

Mariana Fabian, Jasmine Gallup, Desmera Gatewood, Tasso Hartzog, Elliott Harrell, Brian Howe, Jordan Lawrence, Elim Lee, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Cy Neff, Andrea Richards, Barry Yeoman

Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

Creative

Circulation Berry Media Group

Membership/ subscriptions

John Hurld

Mathias Marchington

ANGELICA EDWARDS

Top to bottom: Stills from The Last Partera, I'm Not Everything I Want to Be, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The films screen at this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which runs from April 3–6 in downtown Durham. Read more p. 22-25.

B A C K TA L K

Lena Geller wrote about the much-anticipated reopening last month of the Wheels roller-skating rink in Durham, which the city purchased and revamped after it closed in 2020. Readers shared their thoughts on the piece (posted online and here on page 8) and the Bull City landmark’s revival:

From Bluesky user LEFFJAKIN:

Maybe the feel-good civic story of the year, one that makes you proud to live in Durham. @lenarosegeller.bsky.social’s writing is, as always, impeccable in capturing the moment and the joy.

Can’t wait til my kid is old enough to get out there with some rental skates and a walker!

From Bluesky user JENLOWE:

If you want to feel good about what government can do, read this about the city reopening a roller skating rink in Durham NC.

This season of The White Lotus features characters who hail from Durham. Chase Pellegrini de Paur called up a linguist to get the official story on whether the actors’ Bull City accents are any good. Readers had a lot to the say about the article—and even more to say on the accents:

From Reddit user MELODIC_WEREWOLF9288:

This is such a satisfying read as a North Carolinian (also spent several years in the Triangle area)—I felt so gaslit by all the comments about how spot on these accents were!

From Reddit user THISISMETRYINGAGAIN:

An interesting intellectual exercise but ultimately irrelevant. Most people don’t recognize their own accents/the regional accent of where they live so all the people watching the show who are complaining on here about the accents being “off” likely would be doing so even if that professor said the accents were spot on.

From Reddit user INDEPENDENT_GOLF7490:

I’m 52 and have lived in the Triangle my entire life. I don’t have a Southern accent but both my parents did. I know others my age who also grew up in the area that do have it though.

My friends in my teenage years either came from outside the state or had parents who were from other places. I definitely think that had a big influence on how I spoke. That and my fear of sounding ignorant, which is how I associated the accent to sound. I realize how that seems now, but everyone I knew with that type of accent at the time were people I loathed for various reasons (bigots, racists, etc.)

All that to say, I think the author is on point about how all the transplants have reshaped the cities in NC.

From Instagram user MELVIN__PENA:

i love local news and parker posey

From Instagram user VIXENANDTHEKITTEN:

This is local journalism

From Instagram user KMCKEEUNC:

I’m certainly not a linguistics expert, but I’ve lived in Durham my entire life, got two degrees at UNC and have feelings about Duke (which I do not pronounce Dewk). I DO NOT talk like Parker Posey in The White Lotus. To me, she’s way too down South. Sounds more like she’s from the eastern part of the state or even the girls I went to college with from South Carolina. Her accent actually is driving me a bit crazy. To me, it’s what other people think Southerners talk like. Just my opinion on this crucially important topic.

Zero-Based Budgeting: A Fresh Start for Durham’s Budget

With chaos at the federal level and declining sales tax revenue, Durham’s budget needs to be airtight. Zero-based budgeting eliminates waste, boosts efficiency, and increases transparency.

BY NIDA ALLAM backtalk@indyweek.com

Government budgets are a lot like closets; if you don’t clean them out occasionally, you end up hoarding stuff you don’t need while struggling to find the things that matter. For years, local governments have relied on the “add a little here, trim a little there” budgeting method. But what if we did it differently?

Enter zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the Marie Kondo of government finance. Instead of just adjusting last year’s numbers, ZBB forces every department to start from scratch and justify every expense. If it doesn’t serve the community effectively, does it really spark joy? No? Then maybe it’s time to let it go.

What is zero-based budgeting?

Unlike traditional budgeting, which simply tweaks last year’s numbers, ZBB starts every budget cycle from scratch. Every department and office must justify all expenses, ensuring that spending aligns with our community’s most pressing needs rather than just rolling over outdated spending.

Why does this matter?

• It eliminates waste: We don’t just rubber-stamp old allocations. We review programs, and if they aren’t effective, we fix them or reallocate funds.

• It boosts efficiency: It encourages all departments and offices to think outside the box and make wise spending decisions instead of relying on automatic funding increases.

• It increases transparency: Residents can see precisely how their tax dollars are spent, making our government more accountable.

Why now? Because chaos at the national level means we need stability here at home

Look, if there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that we can’t count on the federal government to make smart financial decisions. Between the revolving door of White House economic policies (or lack thereof) and the general circus act happening in Washington, the best thing we can do is make Durham’s budget as airtight as possible. We don’t have the luxury of just hoping for a revenue windfall; we need to plan ahead, and ZBB is how we do it.

Lessons from other communities

Several local governments have used ZBB with success, yielding significant savings:

• Los Altos, California, adopted ZBB and earned multiple awards for excellence in budgeting. This allowed resources to be shifted to where they were most needed.

• Georgia was the first state to implement ZBB and improve resource allocation and government efficiency.

• Houston, Texas, used ZBB to prioritize vital services and eliminate unnecessary spending, making the city’s budget more sustainable.

Why this matters for Durham

This year, I’m prioritizing ZBB to ensure we are strategically prepared for future budget cycles, especially as we face several fiscal challenges:

• Declining sales tax revenue: Our budget department has reported that Durham County has seen a nearly 10 percent decrease in sales tax revenue.

• Limitations on progressive property taxation: North Carolina state law restricts our ability to implement progressive property tax rates, limiting our flexibility in revenue generation and creating inequitable tax burdens on our most vulnerable residents.

• Uncertain future revenues: Given these constraints, we cannot rely on the high revenue growth we have experienced in the past few budgets.

Let’s embrace this opportunity to rethink our budgeting process, eliminate redundancies, and invest wisely in Durham’s future. By evaluating every expense now through ZBB, we can ensure that our spending decisions are based on essential community needs rather than outdated or inefficient patterns. If we get this right, we’ll be prepared for future tax revaluations and beyond. If we don’t? Well, we’ll be stuck playing financial whack-a-mole while Washington continues setting money on fire while their billionaire friends get tax cuts. Bottom Line: If we don’t clean out and reorganize the budget closet now, we’re going to regret it later. Let’s make every dollar count! W

Nida Allam is chair of the Durham County Board of Commissioners.

Deep Cuts

A kindergarten teacher at a Title 1 school in Raleigh reflects on the impacts of federal funding cuts to the Wake County Public School System.

BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL chloe@indyweek.com

Last summer, 21-year-old Natalie Self moved across the country from Texas to take a job as a kindergarten teacher at Wildwood Forest Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh. Fresh out of college, she was excited to finally realize her lifelong dream of becoming an educator.

Self landed at Wildwood Forest thanks to Project LEADERS, a federal grant program that aimed to recruit more teachers to Wake County’s highest-need schools— those with relatively more minority and low-income students, lower test scores, and lower teacher retention rates. But now that the U.S. Department of Education has canceled the grant, Self is considering leaving after only one year—“which is crazy,” she says, “because just a couple weeks before this happened, I was completely planning on staying.”

The Department of Education announced last month it was canceling $600 million worth of “divisive teacher training grants” across the country, including $11.78 million for the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) to implement Project LEADERS (Leveraging Employee Advancement to Develop Excellence and Reach Success).

According to WCPSS, the grant helped hire 133 new teachers across the system’s 24 highest-need schools since January 2024, leading to a 40 percent reduction in teacher vacancies in those schools.

“This grant made a real difference for students,” WCPSS wrote in a statement on its website after the funding cut was announced. “It helped schools hire teachers faster, reduced vacancies, and improved hiring processes so more kids could start the school year with a full-time teacher in place. The program was effective, well-managed, and delivered real results.” (WCPSS did not respond to a request for further comment.)

The Department of Education characterized the grants it canceled as promoting critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and antiracism. In the case of WCPSS, the money covered $1,500 hiring bonuses, $2,500 retention bonuses, training sessions, and tuition assistance for beginning teachers.

When Self was applying for jobs last year, she got a couple offers within the Wake school system and ended up accepting the position at Wildwood Forest because of the incentives from the Project LEADERS program. The first few months of teaching weren’t exactly what she expected: “overwhelming” was the word that came to mind.

Although Self knew from the beginning that Wildwood Forest was designated a “low-performing” school by the NC Department of Public Instruction and qualified for federal Title I funding because of the proportion of students from low-income families it serves, she was still surprised at the level of extra support her students needed. Many were food insecure and living below the poverty line, and she found herself taking on the role of a counselor and social worker on top of her normal teaching responsibilities.

“I’m always trying to make sure that my kids’ basic needs are met,” Self says. “A lot of times, they’re coming in really tired because they didn’t get sleep, or they don’t have the right clothes for the type of weather that we’re having, or they’re frustrated or upset because their parents are fighting, and so they get a bad start to their day.”

Self found herself worrying, on weekends and during her school breaks, whether some of her students were safe, whether they were hungry.

“It’s been a burden that I didn’t fully expect,” she says.

The Project LEADERS grant funded specialized training sessions to help teachers like Self manage their classrooms and support their students.

“They really made a space for us [teachers] to connect and feel seen and cared for … and help equip us even more to teach to the specific context we were dealing with,” Self says. “We talked a lot about culturally responsive teaching, being in such diverse places.”

Now that the grant is canceled, there won’t be any more training sessions, Self says. Nor will she receive her $2,500 retention bonus, which she was expecting at the end of the school year. Just before the Department of Education terminated the Project LEADERS grant, Self applied and was approved for $1,000 in tuition assistance toward her teacher licensure classes—but the reimbursement never showed up in her paycheck.

Self, who lives alone in Raleigh on a teacher’s salary and has student loans to pay down, describes her financial situation as “making it, but barely.” The bonuses and tuition assistance would have made a big difference. Losing them has made her consider transferring from Wildwood Forest to another Wake County school.

“As badly as I want to stay, it’s just not realistic with the burden that comes with it, knowing that I could go somewhere else and make the same amount of money,” Self says. “It makes me sad, because staff turnover is a big issue at all of these [Project

LEADERS] schools, and I think that these retention bonuses were going to be really big to help solve that problem.”

Self didn’t see the grant money going toward anything “divisive,” as the Department of Education phrased it.

“It was recruiting teachers and placing highly qualified educators in the places that need the most, where people don’t necessarily want to go without some extra push,” she says.

Of WCPSS’s approximately $2 billion operating budget, about 10 percent comes from federal funds. As the Trump administration and DOGE continue their slash-andburn approach to reducing federal spending, and Trump looks to eliminate the Department of Education altogether via executive order, it’s likely that Wake schools, teachers, and students will continue to feel the effects.

Earlier this month, WCPSS announced a 90-day hiring freeze for some central office positions, in part because of uncertainty about ongoing federal funding.

For Self, the worst-case scenario would be losing access to Title I funds, one of the biggest pots of money Wake schools receive from the federal government.

“We use it for materials. We use it to pay salaries. We have support staff that are paid out of Title I so that our students can get extra intervention,” Self says. “I’ve seen so many benefits, so the thought of my students not having those resources is really scary.” W

Natalie Self, a kindergarten teacher, in her classroom at Wildwood Forest Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

Durham

In Transit

Heading into budget season, council members want to keep Durham buses free. But with expenses growing and federal funding uncertain, paying for the city’s bus system isn’t as simple as years past.

BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW jlaidlaw @indyweek.com

Durham City Council is in the heart of budget season. With two meetings under their belt, members of council are starting to make difficult decisions about their budget priorities. The city council doesn’t always find consensus, but it seems council members agree that keeping the city’s bus fleet fare-free is a top priority.

Maintaining free bus fare will be even more of a challenge this year. The injection of federal funds deployed to state and local governments during the pandemic is starting to run out, and the current administration is unlikely to provide additional funding for transportation projects, especially those in any way connected to DEI or climate initiatives. The city council will need to find other sources of revenue to operate the bus system, which could include bringing back bus fares. But council members have been steadfast in their desire to keep buses free so as to not alienate Durham’s low-income riders, many of whom rely on public transit for basic needs.

“I think fare-free transit ticks the box of every single goal that we want to achieve as a city,” said council member Nate Baker during the city council’s budget retreat last month. “Even if we can’t do some of the other things that we’d like to do, I think this is crucial and I think that’s why it came out number one in prioritization.”

With all-time-high ridership in 2024, the growing expenses of operating the bus system overall and a lack of options for increasing revenue has put city transportation staff in a bind.

“Like our peer transit systems, we now face a fiscal cliff but with fewer options to balance the budget without pain-

ful cuts to services,” Transportation Director Sean Egan told the council, laying out potential paths forward for the city’s bus system and the feasibility of keeping buses free of charge.

In 2019, the last year that GoDurham collected fares, the city brought in $2.4 million in revenue. Returning to fares would bring GoDurham’s farebox recovery—the percentage of the system’s operating expenses covered by fares—to 15 percent, which would still be six points below the industry average. If city council considers bringing back fares, Egan suggests a $2 per-ride fare for fixed-route and ACCESS service, a paratransit option that is required under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Egan says that restoring fares to their prepandemic rate of $1 per ride would incur its own cost: city staff time, new equipment, and the additional time it takes to actually collect the fares, estimated at up to 3,900 hours per year. Those costs nearly offset the potential gains from reintroducing the $1 rate.

Disputes over fare collection could also lead to an increased risk of bus operator assaults, Egan said, which would put drivers’ safety in jeopardy and make it harder to recruit new bus drivers in the future.

Making the bus cost-prohibitive for “fare-sensitive” riders is also on the list of drawbacks. Egan said that 87 percent of the riders who paid fares in 2019 made less than $35,000 a year.

Last month, bus riders, cyclists, and other transportation enthusiasts rallied to keep GoDurham buses free in honor of Transit Equity Day, which is celebrated each year

to honor civil rights icon Rosa Parks, whose birthday is February 4, 1913.

A collection of advocacy groups—Bike Durham, Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, People’s Alliance, Durham Congregations in Action, and Coalition for Affordable Housing and Transit—known collectively as the Transit Equity Campaign partners, organized the event to engage with bus riders at Durham Station and spread their message to the folks who are most likely to be impacted by any changes to bus fares.

Many of Durham’s transit users rely on the bus system for basic travel needs to school, work and health-care facilities, Breana Van Velzen, executive director of Durham Congregations in Action, said at the Transit Equity Day rally.

Van Velzen said that the buses also provide vital access to Durham’s third spaces like libraries and public parks, which are important resources for what Van Velzen and others call the “loneliness epidemic.”

Similarly, at a celebration last year, Durham mayor Leonardo Williams said fare-free bus service allowed residents to easily visit family members in need, access vital healthcare centers like Duke Regional and the Veterans Affairs hospital, and connect youth with their friends as well as recreational opportunities.

“This underscores the interconnectedness and importance of a robust, accessible transit system that reaches beyond our immediate view,” Williams said.

But financing the increase in bus services, including raising bus operator pay, means the city will have to consider further increases in property taxes for Durham resi-

Durham Station PHOTO BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW

dents. For Mayor Pro Tem Mark-Anthony Middleton, that’s where the rubber meets the road.

One-time federal funding was used during the pandemic to increase bus operator wages by 35 percent, making it the highest in the region. Starting pay in FY2025 for bus operators is $20.63 per hour, while top hourly pay is $31.43. This growth in wages occurred without revenue from bus fare or an increase in the transit fund’s property tax allocation, which remained at 3.75¢.

“If we’re going to keep it, and I support it, we’re going to have to have a serious conversation about and be prepared to defend a tax increase,” Middleton said. “I was amazed that, when we were going through the pay raise debate, the number of folk who came and said, ‘Treat our city employees right.’ And then after we passed it, some of those same people were attacking us for raising taxes.”

During the budget presentation last month, Christina Riordan, director of budget and management services, said that a 0.01¢ increase in the property tax rate would yield about $6.8 million in additional revenue for the city.

“I think long-term, asking our residents to look at an increase in the property tax beyond the 3.75 cents to pay for transit is absolutely a winner in terms of accessibility, the wages for our workers, and our climate goals,” said council member Carl Rist.

With cuts to federal funding, council member Chelsea Cook says the county and other partners like Duke University can do more to support the community’s transit needs. There have been ongoing discussions about GoDurham buses transporting Durham Public Schools students, and Cook says that when she hops on the bus, she regularly notices Duke students taking trips as well.

Last December, city and county officials joined other local partners in celebrating the groundbreaking for a $26 million renovation to the downtown Durham transportation hub. The investment signifies that local officials are committed to improving the public transportation network to make it more enticing for Durham residents to choose alternative transit options.

“I don’t know if and when or how we return to fares, but I think the only way we win in the future is if we get folks to use the bus,” said council member Javiera Caballero. “That means reliable transit, clean buses, comfortable experience, and changing culture and practices.”

The first public hearing on the FY2025–26 budget was held Monday, with a preliminary budget set to be presented to council on May 19. W

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Roll With It

For an INDY staffer who grew up going to Wheels in Durham, its HGTV-worthy reno feels like “somebody took my childhood memories, ran them through the wash, and handed them back to me pristine.”

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

At the grand reopening of Wheels, Durham’s iconic roller-skating rink, last month, I’m waiting outside for the slate of speakers to start when I notice someone in a hot pink velour tracksuit approaching from over the hill.

Even though it’s raining and 15 minutes before the ceremony, the main lot has already filled up, with this tracksuit wearer—like many others—relegated to the distant overflow area.

As the figure gets closer, I realize it’s my old friend and sometime INDY contributor Cy Neff. I’m hit with dual waves of surprise and nostalgia—Cy doesn’t live here anymore, and I thought he was out of the country. But it feels perfectly right that he’s here. We both grew up going to Wheels for field trips and birthday parties and also had our share of Wheels outings in high school, some separate and some together.

He sits down next to me.

“Couldn’t miss the opening,” he says.

For those who haven’t been following the saga: Wheels

Fun Park had the same local owners for 40 years, but when they retired in 2020, the city bought the facility from them, with plans already in the works to build an aquatic center. Residents, concerned the rink could be lost, petitioned the city council to prioritize preserving it alongside the planned aquatic facility.

Now, the facility is owned by the city, with the rink operated by United Skates of America. Meanwhile, other parts of the original Wheels property are being converted into the new aquatic center; Durham voters recently passed a bond referendum that will fund that $43 million project.

I immediately comment on Cy’s outfit; he grins and points toward the building’s exterior, where there’s a striking new art installation by local artist Dare Coulter who was commissioned by the city to create a site-specific public art installation. From a distance, the installation looked like a mural, but I now realize it’s something more sculptural—colorful cut-out figures of skaters mounted on poles against a blue backdrop. And there’s Cy, immortalized in

his hot pink tracksuit as part of the permanent display. Coulter, the artist, is one of the evening’s speakers. She arrives wearing a black-and-white striped skirt, knee-high platform boots, and a letter jacket that says DURM BULL CITY—an outfit that’s simultaneously paying homage to 1950s roller rinks and present-day Durham.

To create inspiration for the installation, Coulter held a “skate party” last April at the outdoor pavilion at Durham Central Park, taking photos of community members to incorporate into the artwork.

“It’s not just that this is artwork that’s outside of Wheels,” Coulter says. “It’s artwork that’s of Wheels. The people in this art grew up going to Wheels.”

Durham City Council member Carl Rist, whose now 30-something sons grew up celebrating birthdays at Wheels, takes the microphone next.

“This is what local government does,” Rist says. “Think about the story. You had a local entrepreneur who decided they could no longer run this great community institution. They came to the city, who had the resources and people with expertise that could make this happen. We took over Wheels, and then the community said, ‘Wait a minute, we want to make sure that stays a roller-skating rink.’ And so we have processes to do community engagement.”

He pauses, looking out at the crowd.

“Nobody here has not seen the headlines in the paper, right? Our federal government—there’s nothing but denigration to hear about the role of government from our federal government. It’s all bad news. What we have here is a model for how local government is uniquely positioned to do good in the world.”

Preserving the rink wasn’t just about nostalgia. The dozens of community members who showed up to city council meetings in 2022, advocating for the rink’s preservation, emphasized how Wheels contributes to community safety

Skaters at the grand reopening of Wheels roller-skating rink in Durham on February 27, 2025. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Durham mayor Leonardo Williams skates during the reopening of Wheels. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

by giving young people a structured place to gather and providing physical activity in a place where recreational spaces are unequally distributed. Following the overwhelming public response, the city shifted focus toward reopening the roller rink alongside planning the aquatic center.

“When you’re a kid, Christmas or your birthday would never come quick enough. I think the same is true here for Wheels,” says Durham Parks and Recreation (DPR) director Wade Walcutt.

By the time the mayor cuts the ribbon, more than 100 people are gathered outside. The rain is starting to subside.

After signing a waiver (“DO YOU HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE? IF NO, WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU DO NOT SKATE”) and getting through security (“No vapes? No weapons?”), I step inside.

It’s like the big-reveal moment on HGTV renovation shows when homeowners see their transformed space for the first time. Right behind me, a woman wearing a backpack with blue-wheeled roller skates strapped to it freezes in the entrance way, her hand clasped over her mouth. She pulls out her phone and starts taking a panoramic video.

“Oh my god,” she keeps saying, “Oh my god. Oh my god.”

While the exterior of the building is new, the inside looks pretty much exactly like it always has, but everything is just new and beautiful: bright patterned carpet dotted with colorful stars and swirls, disco balls,

multicolor lighting, DJ booth pumping out Usher and Missy Elliott. The snack bar is stocked with bags of cotton candy, soft pretzels with cheese, and lava-hot slices of pizza. The dining/birthday party section with picnic tables stands ready for the next generation of celebrations. It’s disorienting in the best way possible, like somebody took my childhood memories, ran them through the wash, and handed them back to me pristine.

There’s a new graffiti-style art piece at one end of the rink, a riot of neon colors against the wall.

“It smells new,” Cy exclaims, inhaling.

There’s a woman toward the entrance greeting people with such zeal, embracing patrons like long-lost relatives, that I figure she must’ve grown up here. (She gave the “Oh my god” woman a big hug.)

But no, she tells me: her name is Netta Thomas, she’s from the nexus of “Philly, South Jersey, and Dela-who, Dela-what, Delaware,” and she is a professional whistle blower—like a literal whistle blower, blowing a whistle around her neck to hype people up.

“I’m 67 years old and I’ve been blowing this whistle since I was a little girl,” she says, before adding “I’m gonna go skate now” and gliding away.

Many attendees have brought their own skates, but you can also rent them—they’re shiny and new, beige with four orange wheels. Employees are walking around with trays of samples of mozzarella sticks,

chicken tenders, and cheesy bread.

On the floor, a handful of superbly skilled adult skaters are letting their inner child out, some spinning gracefully in the middle of the rink while others fly around the rim. I went ice skating at the outdoor rink in Cary’s Fenton development in December, and the ice was so cut up that you could barely slide without getting your skate caught on a chink in the surface. This is the polar opposite: you barely have to move to start rolling. The floor is so smooth and slippery it feels like you’re gliding through butter.

Some differences between the OG Wheels and the revamp: There used to be a projector screen on the far wall of the rink that played music videos; that’s gone. Probably for the best—nothing kills skating momentum like getting distracted by a Bieber video.

The original Wheels also had not only a roller rink but another building that housed a massive play structure, a four-level fortress with nets, tubes, a huge ball pit (accessed by two slides), and these sort of car wash components where you’d push your way through big soft brushy roller things.

I ask DPR’s communications manager Mary Unterreiner, who’s standing by the edge of the rink watching people skate, what’s going on with the play structure.

She says the building that houses it is part of the property that’s going to be turned into the new aquatic center. Right

now, she adds, the gym is still in there, unused for years. I get a fleeting mental image of the clowns from Durham Parks and Rec’s Creepy Clown Walk living inside.

Arcade games and prizes were another element of the play structure building, and fortunately, a version of that arcade experience has been re-created inside the new roller rink. There are various ball-throwing arcade games and a prize booth stocked with whoopee cushions, big foam dice, erasers, candy, and blow-up aliens.

Over the course of the night, I try to find people who grew up coming here to talk to, but it’s tough—most of them are busy skating on the floor. (Lamenting to a sheriff’s deputy that I’m having a hard time finding people, he told me he grew up coming here but then declined to be interviewed.)

I do chat with another person who’s pictured in the art installation: Caitlin Gooch, a Wendell resident and friend of Coulter’s.

“I just feel like community doesn’t just stop where we are,” says Gooch, who founded a nonprofit called Saddle Up and Read that uses horseback riding to encourage literacy. “Community leaders like me being incorporated into public art is really important. And I have locs. I’m really thankful that she incorporated me in my locs.”

By the end of the evening, the rink is filled with skaters. Some are shuffling sideways, palming the wall for stability, while others twirl elegantly in reverse. Watching everyone find their rhythm feels like witnessing a glimpse of the rink’s revival. W

Cy Neff and his hot pink tracksuit memorialized in a mural at Wheels. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

The prize counter at the newly reopened Wheels roller-skating rink.

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Chapel Hill

Apply Here

The application for new superintendent of Chapel HillCarrboro City Schools is open after Nyah Hamlett resigned, citing family obligations and safety concerns.

BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR chase@indyweek.com

The search is on for a new Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) superintendent.

This month, the school board officially launched the application for its next chief executive as Nyah Hamlett prepares to resign at the end of June. Her contract was not set to expire until 2027.

Applications are due on April 14 and a draft timeline has set two rounds of closed interviews through the spring, with hopes of a final announcement by May 30.

“While many students in the school system have high academic achievement, there are those who still have unmet needs,” reads the job posting. “The board is strongly focused on and committed to providing equitable services to all students so that all may reach their potential.”

In launching the search, the board approved a $21,500 consulting agreement with the NC School Board Association (NCSBA) to manage the parts of the search process that occur prior to a board review of the candidates. The board previously contracted with NCSBA in 2020, after then-superintendent Pam Baldwin resigned.

The board also gave final approval to launch surveys to hear what exactly staff and community members want to see in their next chief executive. The surveys will go out through all of the district’s regular newsletters and social media, and NCSBA consultant Sam Thorp mentioned that other districts have even utilized local television news to reach residents who didn’t even have children in the district.

Members of the board spent much of their March 6 session wordsmithing the job posting and those surveys, in hopes of attracting candidates who share the progressive district’s views on equity and the importance of reducing the gaps in student outcomes by race. In an oft-cited Stanford study, the district is labeled as having the second-highest achievement gap in the country (as measured by standardized test scores).

The district consistently has among the highest graduation rates in the state (most recently 95 percent, compared to North Carolina’s average 86 percent), but rates in the district among Black students (88 percent) and Hispanic

students (84 percent) lagged slightly behind and recent data from the state Department of Public Instruction show much larger gaps in reading and math proficiency among elementary schoolers.

Board member Barbara Fedders requested the removal of a line from the application that framed that high graduation rate as a low “dropout” rate and later raised a similar objection to the use of that word as a noun.

“We are struggling with absenteeism like every other district,” said Fedders, pointing out that not every student who doesn’t show up officially drops out. “I guess I’m just adding, again, my issue with ‘dropout’ and certainly using it as a word to describe a human,” she said later.

Hamlett, who is taking the role of chief equity and development officer for the public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, said in an emotional February speech to the board that she has previously made decisions in the best interest of thousands of children, but the decision to leave was “in the best interest of the three children that I gave birth to.”

She also mentioned some of the uglier parts of the job.

“Since January of 2021, I’ve taken the Michelle Obama ‘when they go low, we go high’ approach to the false narratives, misogynoir and personal attacks, the threats to the safety of my family, and blatant attempts to undermine my leadership and my character,” Hamlett said.

She was likely pointing, at least in part, to the ongoing conflict with the Klosty family, which is currently suing the superintendent in a saga that involved Hamlett requesting

a no-contact order after an episode in which Hunter Klosty called her a “plagiarizing bitch” when she withheld a fist bump from him at his 2023 graduation ceremony.

“I have every confidence that this board will select the right leader at the right time to carry this work forward— building on the foundation we have established to ensure that, no matter the distractions that arise locally, across the state, or on the national stage, the work of creating a culturally responsive community where safety and belonging are lived experiences for all will continue with unflinching resolve,” Hamlett said in the February speech.

With Hamlett’s departure, CHCCS will be the latest Triangle school district with a new chief executive. Wake County Public Schools and Durham Public Schools hired new superintendents in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

CHCCS’s sister district, Orange County Schools, recently named Danielle Jones as the replacement for Monique Felder, another Black female superintendent who left before her contract was up. That departure became the focal point of a school board election cycle.

Any successful candidate will certainly need to do their homework by learning more about this specific CHCCS board and its priorities.

“I think the conversation is definitely needed, and I think it would be thoughtful for people to watch the board meeting, to be able to find out exactly what the board is looking for,” said Ashuana Harris, chief human resources officer, at the recent board meeting. “So I think just the conversation in and of itself will help us to find the correct candidate.”

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

After Notable Wins, Can NCAE Make the Case for Public Education?

Educators in Durham and Guilford Counties secured big wins amid ongoing fights about the future of public schools. Now the state association representing teachers is looking to leverage local wins into statewide gains.

BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW jlaidlaw@indyweek.com

The auditorium at Athens Drive Magnet High School in Raleigh buzzed with anticipation last July as members of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) scattered across the room bearing large pads of paper and pens. Representatives from local chapters huddled to brainstorm how they would strengthen their ranks by adding members and, more importantly, how they could make public education an inescapable issue in the 2024 election. For NCAE members, summer wasn’t so much a break as a chance to strategize and increase visibility. The annual

Summer Leaders gathering, a weeklong event where members can debrief on their achievements, celebrate big wins, and collaborate with other locals before the fall, was a key chance to do that in person.

Last summer’s meeting had a heightened sense of urgency. NCAE set its sights on three consequential statewide candidates in the 2024 election: Josh Stein, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate; Mo Green, the Democrat running for state superintendent of public instruction; and Allison Riggs, the Democrat running to maintain her seat

BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Without allies in these offices, they feared an uphill battle on education policy in the state. Whether they could help elect Stein, Green, and Riggs was a key test of their strategy.

Stein’s opponent, Mark Robinson, routinely called public schools “indoctrination centers” on the campaign trail.

The Republican nominee for state superintendent, Michele Morrow, was a homeschool parent who deemed public schools “the indoctrination army of the socialist dems.” Green, meanwhile, had previously served as superintendent of Guilford County Schools—the third largest district in North Carolina, with more than 70,000 students. On the campaign trail, Green said “the very soul of public education is on the ballot”—a sentiment NCAE certainly shared.

The outcome of the state supreme court race, still up in the air months later, will likely also impact decisions on issues like redistricting and the future of Leandro, a 1997 court ruling that says the state is obligated to provide a “sound, basic education” for every child. Republicans currently hold a 5–2 majority; a Riggs loss would be a setback.

At Summer Leaders, NCAE leadership stood at the head of the high school auditorium as the faces of visionary civil rights leaders and labor rights activists like Marshall Ganz and Ella Baker flashed across the projector screen. Speakers invoked labor movements of old to inspire the crowd of eager organizers who hooted, hollered, and jeered as leadership laid out the organization’s six-year electoral plan.

The plan seems to have worked for 2024; should Riggs hold off her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to throw out ballots, the union will have gone three for three on key races in 2024. As a bonus, the Democrats broke the congressional supermajority, ending Republicans’ ability to override the governor’s veto.

Public education advocates now have a formidable base of allies at the highest levels of state government. But the question remains: What kind of political power can NCAE yield to make the case for public education?

Changing the course

For decades, funding public education was a bipartisan priority, led by longtime Democratic governor Jim Hunt, the son of a schoolteacher. In 1970, public education funding amounted to just over half the state’s general fund at 52.5 percent. Business leaders, in particular, saw public schools as a crucial talent pipeline.

“Hunt was really successful in weaving together the importance of public education to economic develop -

Attendees of the North Carolina Association of Educators Summer Leaders conference write down their ideas.

PHOTO

ment,” says Geoff Coltrane, senior director of government affairs and strategy at the NC Department of Public Instruction. “And there were a lot of business leaders who stood beside Gov. Hunt on that.”

But when the Great Recession hit, states had to make hard decisions about where to adjust their budgets, Coltrane says. At the same time, the NC House and Senate flipped in 2011 from majority Democrat to Republican, leading to a shift in legislative priorities.

One of their priorities was expanding the state’s charter school program. Charter schools are publicly funded but have their own leadership structure outside the local district. While they are still accountable for student performance and spending, they are given more flexibility on how they achieve those outcomes, Coltrane says. In the 1990s, state officials capped the total number of charter schools in North Carolina at 100. After Republicans assumed all three branches of government in 2013, the cap was lifted and the state now has roughly 220 charter schools.

“The pitch was that they were intended to be sort of like laboratories of innovation,” Coltrane says. “I think the vision was that what’s learned in these charter schools could potentially be transferred over to help public schools improve. So it was intended to help support the public education system overall.”

But that hasn’t really happened, he says. Instead, many feel like the growth of charters has put them in competition with other public schools for both students and resources.

Since the 2011–12 school year, average per-pupil spending has increased by nearly $2,000. About 10 percent of students in public schools here now attend a charter. At the same time, more state money is flowing to private schools through the state’s Opportunity Scholarship program, often called school-choice vouchers. Legislators vastly expanded the program last year, making vouchers available to families of any income level to cover private school tuition. So far, over $463 million has been allocated to roughly 55,000 students—an amount that is expected to cut into the per-pupil spending of public schools as they lose students.

Bryan Proffitt, a teacher and political organizer, has been fighting this trend for two decades. Proffitt was elected president of Durham County’s NCAE chapter, Durham Association of Educators (DAE), in 2015 and joined state leadership in 2019 when he was elected NCAE vice president.

The trend toward private and charters is creating instability for students and families, he says. “When you privatize and let the markets choose, you have constant volatility,” he says. “The market isn’t a stabilizing force, it’s a volatile force.”

Take the example of New Orleans, where the entire school system is now charter schools. Students are constantly at risk of being forced to change schools if their charter isn’t renewed. “You’d have a charter pop up, and then six months later that charter would shut down and those students get distributed someplace else,” Proffitt says. “And then that place shuts down in another six months.” Now the city is rebuilding a

unified public school district.

Pay freezes and staffing shortages have also contributed to frustration and turnover. The average teacher salary has grown only from $46,700 in 2011 to $58,592 in 2024, slightly exceeding increases in the cost of living. Attrition is also a concern; according to the Department of Public Instruction, 11.5 percent of teachers left their role in 2024.

The concerns have given rise to a new generation of leadership at NCAE. Tamika Walker Kelly, an elementary school music teacher in Cumberland County, was elected NCAE president in 2020 amid piqued battles over pandemic-era closures and increasingly tight budgets.

“We know educators are not leaving the profession because they don’t want to be educators,” Walker Kelly says. “It’s because of the conditions that exist here in the state of North Carolina.”

Walker Kelly, Proffitt, and the new NCAE leadership wanted to take the fight to the state legislature, and Summer Leaders, launched in 2020, was among their new initiatives. The program aimed to empower members to see themselves as having a role to play in the future of education.

“The first part was the shift in purpose,” Proffitt says. “We have to shift the philosophy and process. So we’re going to talk about power, and we’re going to talk about organizing rather than service.”

The 2024 Summer Leaders program brought together 110 members representing 21 local chapters. NCAE encourages any member from the locals to participate in Summer Leaders, not just leadership, so the

members can develop a stronger capacity for political organizing and recruitment. Statewide, NCAE membership has grown 33 percent since 2021. That growth comes despite the fact that overall union membership in the state is at a paltry 2.6 percent. In North Carolina, municipal employees at the city, county, and state levels aren’t restricted from participating in union activity, but they are legally prohibited from collectively bargaining for a contract.

At Summer Leaders, participants receive training and support from NCAE staff and members on how to recruit new members and effectively communicate their asks—like increased funding and professional development resources—to their community and local government. Everyone is expected to “leave with a plan,” Proffitt says, for how they’d recruit and grow their local chapter.

Durham flexes its muscle

In Durham, the local chapter tested its political heft last year after a wage dispute caused a firestorm. The district had issued raises to classified employees after a compensation study recommended more equitable pay, but just months later, the district said it was unable to fulfill the adjusted salaries.

The ensuing outcry ignited a surge in organizing and advocacy for DAE, which eventually won a historic $27 million from Durham County for increased staff pay and a stronger budget supplement in the 2024–25 school budget. DAE nearly tripled its membership amid the fight, from 880 in

Volunteers with the Durham Association of Educators convene and receive instructions before knocking on doors last October. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

2023 to 2,600 by last May.

Heading into Summer Leaders last year, DAE had certainly raised the bar for other locals.

“We had it all sketched out,” says DAE president Mika Hunter Twietmeyer. “We had maybe six field organizers in Durham last year, just meeting with members in schools, meeting with nonmembers in schools, talking to them. A lot of people didn’t even know DAE existed, especially in some buildings that didn’t have a lot of members at all.”

The pay dispute was a timely target, but Twietmeyer says they’d already had ambitious plans.

“I don’t think our strategy would have changed,” Twietmeyer says, noting that they were already seeing more people signing up to be involved. DAE now represents more than 50 percent of public school educators in the school system.

But that milestone was not reached overnight. Patience and consistency have been key to success, Walker Kelly says. It’s a long game.

“It does take time, effort, and work in order to be able to be in a position to enact change, to leverage relationships with school board members, with county commissioners, and with the general public, which are all very important entities in ensuring that public education is successful in your county,” says Walker Kelly.

Schools in Guilford County faced similar challenges over pay and funding. “There was a lot of injustice baked into the system, and that was our district’s fault,” says Joanna Pendleton, president of the

Guilford County Association of Educators (GCAE) and an educator there for over 20 years. GCAE worked on a successful yearlong campaign to convince the school district to change the pay scale for classified workers, which went into effect at the start of the 2023–24 school year. Pendleton calls it a “major victory.”

Since 2021, GCAE has added 138 new members to its ranks—a sign, they hope, that is indicative of enthusiasm for collective action.

“There is a gap, and the state, instead of closing the gap, is siphoning millions, and eventually billions, more dollars off into voucher expansion for even the wealthiest families in North Carolina,” Pendleton says. “And we are stuck here begging for crumbs.”

Pendleton believes the voucher program is an opportunity for NCAE to connect with voters, especially families in rural areas.

“Folks in rural communities love their public schools, and need their public schools,” Pendleton says. “They don’t have any private and charter schools to send their kids to as an alternative.”

“Those constituents can really call the shots with some of these Republicans who are doing things that are not in the best interest of their community around public schools,” she continues.

Forward momentum

Last January, Gov. Roy Cooper declared 2024 the “Year of the Public Schools” in a press conference at his former elementary school in Nash County and touted his efforts

“We know educators are not leaving the profession because they don’t want to be educators. It’s because of the conditions that exist here in the state of North Carolina.”

—Tamika Walker Kelly, NCAE president

to bring Republicans around on the issue.

“I came into office eight years ago hoping to reach consensus with them about the importance of public education, and we have made some progress,” Cooper told the audience. Lawmakers have found some common ground on revamping how the state educates its teachers on K–12 reading comprehension, but fights still loom over issues like teacher salaries and vouchers.

Coltrane, who served as senior education adviser under Cooper, says North Carolina has a “long history of dedication to, and understanding the importance of, public education.” For state policymakers, it’s not about whether to invest in education, Coltrane says. It’s about how.

NCAE members like Pendleton see the next four years as a time to aggressively push their agenda. They hope they’ll even have “a chance at playing a little bit of offense, rather than always, always defense,” Pendleton says.

“When it comes to our public schools, it’s a bipartisan issue,” says Walker Kelly. “We are open to welcoming more allies into the work, because at the end of the day, the most important thing is making sure that kids are able to be successful and that they have what they need in order to thrive in their communities and across our state.”

NCAE is also taking the fight to the national stage. Walker Kelly and several others joined hundreds of education advocates in Washington, D.C., on February 13 to protest the confirmation of education secretary nominee Linda McMahon and to lobby Congress over concerns about the Trump administration’s education plans.

“Everyone is talking about the impending dismantling of the Department of Education, and so we’re trying to really advocate with our congressmen and our North Carolina delegation about how critical the functions of the Department of Education are for students,” Walker Kelly says.

On the heels of the local wins, NCAE believes it has the momentum to dream big. The organization has 118 chapters, including at least one in every county. A surge in membership activity gave NCAE more power to execute a noteworthy electoral campaign in North Carolina.

Walker Kelly says the organization remains focused on working with Stein, Green, and other elected officials to “ensure that our priorities and action are focused on.”

“This is a moment where what was presented to voters was a pretty stark choice, and more decided to choose the [candidate] that wants to have a bit more of a positive way of going forward, that recognizes the champions of public education and celebrates the good in public education and reveres educators,” Green said during a virtual press conference following the election.

Proffitt believes the election results speak for themselves; Donald Trump may have won North Carolina, but voters still elected Democrats in key races dealing with public education.

“I think there was a clear referendum in the election on the question of what should be the orientation of government toward public schools. Should it be one of defamation and criticism, or should it be one of, like, these are places we want to invest in?”

Proffit says. “This is where our kids are.” W

Members of the Durham Association of Educators march in May 2024. PHOTO BY TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE ASSEMBLY

The System Is Not Designed to Protect You

When violence shattered their sense of safety, a Durham immigrant family found help from community organizations now stretched to their breaking point due to federal funding cuts.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

On a late winter evening in 2023, Baneen Al Asadi watched through a window as her father Abdulmaged Al Asadi and two brothers, Mohammed Al Asadi and Ameer Al Asadi, approached the front door of her Durham home. Whether or not the visit was welcome is a matter of debate. Her husband, Nabeel Al Halaf, answered the door. How the four men came to blows would later be disputed in court. Mohammed Al Asadi claims he approached Al Halaf for a hug and that Al Halaf attacked him. The husband and wife say the three men immediately moved to attack Al Halaf.

But this much is unambiguous: An altercation erupted on the front steps, with Al Halaf throwing whatever he could grab—a chair, kebab skewers—to keep his in-laws from entering. Mohammed sustained a head injury and fell to the ground. Then, Ameer Al Asadi retrieved a handgun

from his car and shot Al Halaf in the groin while Baneen screamed and their five children watched. The assailants left Al Halaf on the ground and drove Mohammed Al Asadi to the hospital. Baneen, who speaks little English, didn’t know how to call for help. A neighbor who heard the commotion called 911 and paramedics arrived to find Al Halaf unconscious and bleeding profusely.

Two years later, neither Baneen’s father nor her two brothers are in prison. None agreed to comment for this story. According to court documents, after the shooting, police tracked them down at the hospital where Mohammed Al Asadi was being treated for his head injury. Ameer admitted to the shooting, and all three were subsequently charged—Ameer with assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury, and Mohammed and Abdulmaged with assault inflicting serious injury and attempted felony break-

ing and entering with intent to terrorize or injure. After accepting plea deals in Durham County Superior Court last October, they received suspended sentences and probation, along with formal no-contact orders. None served additional jail time beyond what they’d already spent in custody awaiting trial.

Al Halaf, 43, and Baneen, 27, who fled Iraq in the early 2010s seeking safety, say they’ve found themselves without adequate institutional support following the violence. Local community organizations stepped in to fill critical gaps—installing security cameras, navigating medical appointments, and providing language access that governmental systems couldn’t offer—but these groups, designed to supplement rather than replace government services, are now stretched dangerously thin as federal refugee supports crumble.

Refugee Community Partnership (RCP), the Carrboro-based organization that became Baneen and Al Halaf’s lifeline after the shooting, relies on private donations and foundation grants rather than federal funding. It’s already dealing with an influx of cases.

“The impact of these political attacks on migrant and refugee communities cannot be overstated,” says Ash Nuckols, communications manager at RCP. “Funding cuts have already meant that recently arrived families are calling RCP’s support hotlines, having been informed that promised rental assistance and food deliveries have been suspended.”

During the previous Trump administration, RCP’s membership more than tripled as other services contracted. “This time around, we are already over capacity,” Nuckols says.

Most major resettlement organizations in the Triangle depend primarily on state and federal funding, making them vulnerable to policy shifts. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s January executive order indefinitely suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, Church World Service Durham—which typically helps more than 1,500 refugees each year—has furloughed most of its staff and is now limited to providing only the most urgent services.

As federally funded organizations scale back, community-based groups like RCP are forced to fill widening gaps with already limited resources. The ripple effects extend beyond new arrivals to families like Baneen and Al Halaf’s who have been in the country for years but still need crucial support during crises.

For families like Baneen and Al Halaf’s, this means that the already limited support systems they depend on are becoming even harder to access.

A swarm of support

Shortly after the shooting, when Al Halaf was still in the hospital, he called his children’s school and pleaded for someone to check on his wife. A counselor, searching for resources to help an Arabic-speaking family in crisis,

Baneen Al Asadi and Nabeel Al Halaf photographed at their Durham home in November. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Elizabeth Godown was part of the team that first responded. Along with two colleagues, including an interpreter, Godown, an organizational learning and wellness manager at RCP, went to the house and introduced herself to Baneen.

“The starting point is really language access,” Godown says. “They’re going through this situation, and they just have language barriers surrounding them.”

Starting with providing interpretation for hospital updates about Al Halaf’s condition, that initial connection evolved into comprehensive ongoing support. RCP connected the family with the Family Justice Center, a multiagency resource hub, to navigate the process of obtaining domestic violence protective orders. They provided interpretation services for legal documents and helped explain the complexities of civil versus criminal court systems. When Al Halaf couldn’t return to his jobs after the shooting, RCP connected Baneen with an employment specialist who helped her find work at a bakery. When childcare became a barrier, they helped the family apply for subsidies and enroll in Head Start. When medical appointments multiplied, they provided transportation and language navigation services.

“This was a situation of such dramatic and intense trauma,” says Godown. “They had this single event that just made so many things in their life all fall apart at the same time. We did our best to create a swarm of support and reached out to everyone in our networks.”

Among those contacted was Devin Ceartas from Triangle Mutual Aid, a volunteer-run network that provides direct community support. Ceartas came to set up cameras when the family was staying in a hotel for several weeks following the shooting, too afraid to return home. In the months that followed, he helped with house repairs, watched their children, and stopped by when they texted him that they were feeling unsafe. He and other community members stepped in to provide tutoring for the children. They also built fencing to provide additional security and help ease tensions with neighbors, who had complained about the family’s chickens, goats, and children playing in the yard.

Ceartas says he once spent an afternoon going through a giant pile of mail the family had been collecting in a corner, unable to distinguish between important documents and junk. (Al Halaf speaks some English but isn’t fluent.)

“Just being able to read and communicate to them—‘This says your electricity bill is overdue. This is junk mail’—was very useful

to them,” Ceartas says. “I don’t know that there’s a government program to do that. Who else are you going to ask to help you read your mail? That’s going to be something that you’re going to have to have some sort of relationship with someone to do.”

Barriers to access

On the day after Halloween, Baneen sweeps pumpkin seeds off the small porch of the family’s colonial-style home. She’s wearing a maroon dress with gold rhinestones that match the sparkling star and moon ornaments strung over the brick front steps. On a porch chair, Al Halaf sits in a brown T-shirt and shorts, rolling a string of white prayer beads in his fingers. A few minutes later, Ceartas and Godown arrive, along with an interpreter from RCP.

Over the next several hours, the couple recounts their story. They both left Iraq during the war, spent several years in other

child abuse charges; those charges were voluntarily dismissed after Abdulmaged, who was incarcerated in Durham on unrelated charges at the time, failed to appear in court in Wake Couny.

The events leading up to the shooting are difficult to untangle. Court documents show conflicting accounts: the defendants claimed they came at Al Halaf’s request to help mediate a dispute with neighbors, while Baneen and Al Halaf maintained the visit was unannounced and threatening.

Alexander Charns, Mohammed’s attorney, said in court that his client was struck in the head with a sword during the confrontation that rendered him unconscious and left him with a chipped skull. Mohammed was hospitalized for three days, Charns said.

Charns and Ameer’s attorney, Daniel Meier, wrote in emails to the INDY that their clients declined to comment for this story. Idrissa Smith, who represents Baneen’s father, Abdulmaged Al Asadi, did not respond to an emailed request for com-

“This was a situation of such dramatic and intense trauma. They had this single event that just made so many things in their life all fall apart at the same time.”

countries—Al Halaf in Jordan, Baneen in Turkey—and then relocated to the Triangle, where they met and fell in love.

Life in their Hope Valley neighborhood had brought its own tensions. Their chickens and goats, the children playing in the yard, and at one point even a rescued hawk they rehabilitated clashed with neighbors’ expectations for the quiet suburban street. When seven of Baneen’s family members, including her father and brothers—who had also fled Iraq—moved in, complaints intensified.

Eventually, Al Halaf and Baneen asked the relatives to leave, and the situation grew hostile. There was already a strained history between Al Halaf and his father-inlaw. Court records reveal troubling patterns: Abdulmaged was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse in Wake County in 2012. While out on bail after the shooting of Al Halaf, he was charged with violating a domestic violence protective order in August 2023. In April 2024, he faced new misdemeanor

on bail. The footage shows Baneen, Al Halaf, and their children loading groceries into their minivan outside an Arabic supermarket in Raleigh.

Al Halaf interpreted the video as a threatening message that they were still being watched. Despite the no-contact orders, harassment has continued through family networks overseas, beyond the reach of American courts, he says.

After several hours immersed in the past, the conversation suddenly snaps to the present when Baneen asks whether people have drink preferences. Ceartas, who’s been learning Arabic, says the Arabic word for “orange juice,” and both Baneen and the interpreter squeal; his pronunciation was perfect, they say.

Baneen disappears inside and Ceartas walks around the perimeter of the house, pointing out security cameras he installed.

Some have solar panels for charging. He pauses at a section of fence he built, a project meant to ease tensions with neighbors and provide an extra layer of security.

“The eventual goal of mutual aid is to transform the economy and relationships so that we’re not trapped in this hyperindividualism which is encouraged by modern U.S. capitalism,” says Ceartas, who has worked in organizing for 42 years.

“We’re building alternatives to a system where everyone needs their own lawn mower, their own car, where you pay for a gym membership instead of helping build tiny homes,” Ceartas continues.

“We’re transforming not just how we share resources, but how we relate to each other.”

ment and multiple voicemails.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Al Halaf and Baneen faced a labyrinth of systems illequipped to serve them. Medical appointments required interpreters rarely provided. Disability applications demanded documentation in English. Victim services lacked cultural context. The courts moved at a glacial pace through layers of translation.

“When you have a lot of barriers to access, you have to engage with these systems more and more,” Godown says. “But those systems are not adequate to meet the needs of all our people.”

Through it all, the couple’s sense of safety has eroded. As we talk, Al Halaf’s eyes dart to each passing car, and Baneen keeps her phone within reach, anxiously checking notifications.

At one point, Baneen unlocks her phone and plays a video she says relatives in Iraq sent her two months after the shooting, shortly after the defendants were released

Baneen reemerges with a huge platter: coffee, orange juice, pickled jalapeños, olives stuffed with pimentos, flatbreads with ground meat, croissants, and muffins. A few minutes later, their children get off the school bus and run up to greet Ceartas. While they chatter, Baneen and Al Halaf explain that they want to pursue a civil suit against their attackers but lack both the money and knowledge to navigate another legal process.

Al Halaf now requires a walker and hasn’t been able to work since the shooting. Disability checks took months to start arriving, during which time bills piled up and mortgage payments fell behind. The financial strain has made it impossible for them to consider moving away from a neighborhood where they no longer feel safe.

Sorry is not enough

When the three defendants accepted plea deals on October 28, Baneen and Al Halaf were devastated by what they saw as lenient

sentences. Mohammed and Abdulmaged each pleaded guilty to assault inflicting serious injury and attempted felony breaking and entering with intent to terrorize/injure. Ameer pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. All received suspended sentences and probation.

The morning of the hearing, Ceartas drives Baneen and Al Halaf to the courthouse. They discover the room has been changed at the last minute and scramble to find the new courtroom. Then they learn that issues with the electronic calendar system have delayed the proceeding by two hours.

In the meantime, other supporters from Triangle Mutual Aid trickle in. Ceartas had asked community members to come show support. As everyone waits, Ceartas tells a story that captures the reciprocal nature of their support network: Triangle Mutual Aid recently set up a Hurricane Helene relief headquarters in Western North Carolina, and Baneen cooked lunch for the volunteers there.

“That’s one of the things that sets mutual aid apart from charity,” Ceartas says. “Charity would classify them as the needy. Often the people who’ve had the hardest times have the most resourcefulness.”

When the proceeding finally begins, the judge offers the victims the opportunity to read statements they’d prepared with help from interpreters.

Al Halaf speaks first, his voice quiet but steady, describing how the shooting has affected him physically—he needs assistance using the bathroom, bathing, and walking up stairs and has lost sexual function. Baneen follows, her voice tight, describing how their children are traumatized.

“I’m so sorry for what happened to you,” the judge says. It feels like a cue for Baneen to sit down, but she remains standing.

“We think sorry is not enough,” Baneen says, staring intently at the judge.

District Attorney Satana Deberry wrote in an email to the INDY that the plea deals reflected standard outcomes based on the evidence.

“This case had multiple evidentiary issues,” Deberry wrote. “The State must be able to prove charges beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Deberry added that her staff “receives consistent training in dealing with victims of domestic and family violence and we take family violence very seriously.”

“This family benefitted from that concern and training in that multiple staff—

including myself—spent hours with them working through the evidence in this case,” Deberry wrote.

According to the couple, during a meeting with Deberry, she told them, “The system is not designed to protect you. It’s designed to hold people accountable.” Godown, who accompanied the family to this meeting, confirmed hearing this statement.

When asked about this statement, Deberry acknowledged meeting with the victims after they expressed concern with the plea agreement, writing that “the criminal justice system is often more complicated than victims expect.”

Ceartas wasn’t surprised by the result of the court case.

“I know what the justice system does,” Ceartas says. “I know that it’s not going to be the answer. What’s important is being with them, standing beside them. Our job is to help build community around them when that’s the inevitable outcome.”

A big fear

The lack of institutional support for longterm residents like Baneen and Al Halaf

speaks to the broader challenge in refugee services, according to Shane Ellison, clinical professor of law at Duke and supervising attorney in the Duke Immigrant Rights Clinic.

“Resettlement organizations often prioritize new arrivals and recently arrived people,” Ellison explains. “It’s after they’re able to meet those needs that they can help people who’ve been here for a longer period of time. If you’re in a world of diminishing resources, people who’ve been here the longest may find that assistance simply does not exist any longer for them.”

For Baneen and Al Halaf, who arrived more than a decade ago, this means they’re falling further down stretched priority lists.

“The need was already greater than what the nonprofit ecosystem’s capacity was to meet that need,” Ellison adds. “So you’re taking it from a baseline of struggling to meet the demand for services, which is so great, and dramatically reducing its ability to do even that work.”

As traditional systems falter, mutual aid organizers like Ceartas point to the need for fundamentally different approaches.

“Financial support is very de-emphasized in our work,” says Ceartas. “Having lots of money and solving problems primarily through money feeds into that unhealthy pattern of people remaining isolated. The emphasis with mutual aid is much more on getting people to help each other as neighbors.”

“We’re not limited by paid staff or hours of operation,” Ceartas continues. “We’re just limited by the will of the community to show up for each other.”

For now, community efforts across the refugee support landscape seem Sisyphean when balanced against the growing scale of need. In a recent phone call, Al Halaf says his family’s situation hasn’t improved: they’re still afraid, don’t have money to move, and have struggled recently with practical needs like filling out school forms for their children. They’re not receiving the same level of intensive support from RCP that they did during the initial crisis.

“It’s a real fear right now that we’re feeling,” Al Halaf says on the phone. Baneen tells him something in Arabic, her voice urgent. Al Halaf pauses, listens to her, then says, “A big one. A big fear.”

Baneen interjects with one of the few English words she uses: “Scared.” W

Disclosure: INDY’s editor-in-chief Sarah Willets worked for the Durham County District Attorney’s Office during the time in which this case was handled. She was not involved in the reporting or editing of this story.

Clockwise from top left: A bullet hole remains in the wall and door at Baneen Al Asadi and Nabeel Al Halaf’s family’s home; a fence built by Devin Ceartas from Triangle Mutual Aid; a security camera installed by Ceartas. PHOTOS BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

2025 INDY Summer Camp Guide

In our 2025 Summer Camp Guide, we offer plenty of ideas for summer camps that will keep your kids energized, engaged, learning, and getting creative. Want the kids to be active this summer? Send them to dance, fencing, horseback riding, or science-and-nature summer camp. Want them to practice the arts or learn a new skill? There are cooking, visual and performing arts, and music camps available, too. Whatever your child’s interests, and whatever summer camp your family chooses, you can be sure of this: the memories kids make while learning, playing, and adventuring at camp stay with them for a lifetime.

2025 INDY Summer Camp Listings

Belle Vie Farm Summer Camp 2025

Belle Vie Farm

Location: Chapel Hill

Ages: 3-11

Contact: www.belleviefarm.org belleviefarmnc@gmail.com

Blue Skies of Mapleview Summer Horse Camp

Blue Skies of Mapleview LLC

Location: Hillsborough Ages: 8-18

Contact: blueskiesmapleview.us dpmblueskies@hotmail.com 919-933-1444

Broadreach Summer Adventures

Broadreach

Locations: Various locations including the Caribbean, Mexico, the Bahamas, Bali, Fiji, Curacao, Bonaire, Costa Rica, Ecuador and the Azores Ages: Middle and High School students

Contact: gobroadreach.com brhq@gobroadreach.com (919) 256-8200

Camp listings &

Burning Coal Theatre’s Summer Theatre Conservatory

Burning Coal Theatre

Location: Raleigh Ages: 12-19

Contact: burningcoal.org/summer-theatre-conservatory info@burningcoal.org

Camp Riverlea Summer Camp

Camp Riverlea

Location: Durham Ages: 5-12

Contact: campriverlea.com campersupport@campriverlea.com

Camp Woodcroft

Woodcroft Swim and Tennis Club

Location: Durham Ages: 4-12

Contact: woodcroftclub.org/camps-at-woodcroft camp@woodcroftclub.org

Carolina Friends School Summer Programs

Carolina Friends School

Location: Durham Ages: 4-18

Contact: cfsnc.org/summer

2025 INDY Summer Camp Listings

Chestnut Ridge Camp and Retreat Center

Location: Hillsborough

Ages: 5-17

Contact: campchestnutridge.org info@campchesntnutridge.org

Craft Habit Arts & Crafts Camps

Craft Habit

Location: Raleigh

Ages: K-6th Grade

Contact: crafthabitraleigh.com/calendar.htm crafthabitcamps@gmail.com

Craft Habit Sewing Camps

Craft Habit

Location: Raleigh

Ages: K-6th Grade

Contact: crafthabitraleigh.com/calendar.htm crafthabitcamps@gmail.com

Creative Clay Camp

Glazed Expectations

Location: Carrboro

Ages: 5-12 yrs

Contact: glazedexpectations.com/summer-camp susannah@glazedexpectations.com

Durham Academy Summer

Durham Academy

Location: Durham

Ages: 4-18

Contact: da.org/summer summer@da.org

Durham Arts Council Camps

Durham Arts Council

Location: Durham

Ages: 5-18

Contact: durhamarts.org/dac-art-camps (919)560-2726 amiller@durhamarts.org

Durham Jazz Workshop Youth Jazz Camp

Durham Jazz Workshop

Location: Durham

Ages: Middle–High School age students with several years experience playing their instruments. No jazz experience required.

Contact: durhamjazzworkshop.org/youth-jazz-summer-camp

JC Raulston Arboretum Summer Camps

JC Raulston Arboretum

Location: Raleigh

Ages: preschool to rising 8th grade

Contact: jcra.ncsu.edu/education/childrens-program/summer-gardencamps jcraprograms@ncsu.edu

Laying

Hen Farm Summer Camp

Laying Hen Farm

Location: Hillsborough

Ages: 4-14

Contact: Layinghenfarm.com Layinghenfarm@gmail.com

The Morningside School Summer Camps

The Morningside School

Location: Carrboro

Ages: 3-10

Contact: themorningsideschool.com sadie@themorningsideschool.com

Movie Makers Summer Camp

Movie Makers

Location: Durham Ages: 6-17

Contact: movie-makers.net/summer-camp moviemakersnc@gmail.com

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Summer Camps

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Location: Raleigh

Ages: Rising K-12th grade

Contact: naturalsciences.org/calendar/summer-camps summercamps@naturalsciences.org

Pinecone Bluegrass Camp

Page-Walker Arts & History Center

Location: Cary

Ages: 10-17

Contact: pinecone.org/youth-programs/bluegrass-camps sara@pinecone.org

PineCone Jam Camp

Page-Walker Arts & History Center

Location: Cary Ages: 10-17

Contact: pinecone.org/youth-programs/bluegrass-camps sara@pinecone.org

2025 INDY Summer Camp Listings

Radical Days of Summer QORDS

Location: Changes each Summer but is always in the South Ages: 12-17

Contact: qords.org qords@qords.org

Raleigh Little Theatre Summer Camps

Raleigh Little Theatre

Location: Raleigh

Ages: Pre-K-Rising 9th grade

Contact: raleighlittletheatre.org/education/summer-camps education@raleighlittletheatre.org

Schoolhouse of Wonder Outdoor Camps

Schoolhouse of Wonder

Locations: 10 locations in Durham, Wake, and Orange Counties Ages: 4-17 schoolhouseofwonder.org schoolhouse@schoolhouseofwonder.org 919-477-2116

Summer Arts Camps at the Eno Arts Mill

Orange County Arts Commission

Location: Hillsborough

Ages: 5-18

Contact: artsorange.org/camps

Sunrise Community Farm Center’s Summer Camp

Sunrise Community Farm Center

Location: Chapel Hill

Ages: 5-16

Contact: sunrisecommunityfarmcenter.com admin@sunrisecfc.com (919) 968-8581

Teen Learn to Row Camp

Jordan Lake Rowing Club

Location: Apex

Contact: jordanlakerowingclub.org/learn-to-row director@jordanlakerowingclub.org

Town of Cary Summer Camps

Location: Cary

Ages: 5-18

Contact: www.carync.gov/programs (919) 460-4000 311@carync.gov

Triangle Music School Summer Institute & Music Explorers Camp

Triangle Music School

Location: Durham Ages: 8+

Contact: trianglemusicschool.com 919-309-9834 lessons@trianglemusicschool.com

Triangle Ultimate Day Camps

Triangle Ultimate

Location: Carrboro, Morrisville, Durham, Chapel Hill, Apex

Ages: 7-15

Contact: triangleultimate.org/camps camps@triangleultimate.org

Triangle Ultimate Frisbee Camps

Triangle Ultimate

Location: Carrboro, Morrisville, Durham, Chapel Hill, Apex Ages: 7-15

Contact: triangleultimate.org/camps info@triangleultimate.org

Two Sisters Adventure Company Summer Camps

Two Sisters Adventure Company

Location: Durham

Ages: 7-18

Contact: twosistersadventure.com/camps connect@twosistersadventure.com

Vault Theatre Summer Camps

Vault Theatre

Location: Durham

Ages: 6-16

Contact: vaulttheatre.org/camps info@vaultttheatre.org 919-886-4584

The Wonder Lab Summer Camp

The Wonder Lab

Location: Durham

Ages: 3-5

Contact: wonderlabdurham.com/summercamp camps@wonderlabdurham.com 919-213-8527

True Stories

Behind

the scenes at Full Frame

Documentary

Film Festival’s annual downtown Durham extravaganza. In a repressive political climate, the event’s form feels more vital than ever.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

One morning in early March, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival team is on its last mad programming dash.

“We’re in a flurry,” festival co-director Emily Foster says, gesturing at an oversized metallic bulletin board propped up on the table across from her. Founded in 1998 by filmmaker Nancy Buirski, Full Frame draws thousands of documentary lovers to downtown Durham each spring—last year, the Oscar-qualifying event sold more than 17,000 tickets.

It’s a month out from the event, now in its 27th year, and we’re sitting in one of the festival offices at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies.

On the board, a Sharpie grid outlines the screening slots for the event’s April 3–6 dates; inside the grid, dozens of pastel slips are scrawled with the names of documentaries, suspended in magnetic limbo until the screening schedule is finalized.

Choreographing a schedule of 49 films, each with its own team, over four days is akin to playing Jenga—though the art here is in the stacking, not the disassembling.

“We want to meet filmmakers where they are in the life of their work,” artistic and festival co-director Sadie Tillery says, reciting a list of considerations: “How big of a venue? What time of day? When is an artist available to be here? What do they imagine

the conversation after the film looking like? All of that is part of our process, and that involves a lot of phone calls and emails and collaboration and compromise.”

“I expect most filmmakers would want to screen at seven p.m. in Fletcher Hall, right?”

Tillery continues. “That’s not what we can offer in all cases, but we try to bring care and human connection to that process.”

This year, the documentaries occupying those coveted evening slots are Prime Minister on opening night and SALLY on closing night—two very different films, both about the complicated lives of brilliant women.

Prime Minister, from directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe, picks up a thematic thread from last year’s opening film— Girls State, a rousing documentary following a Missouri political leadership camp for girls—with a look back at the five-year tenure of progressive politician Jacinda Ardern, who led New Zealand through a turbulent era as its 40th prime minister and the first PM to give birth while in office.

Cristina Costantini’s SALLY, meanwhile, offers a portrait of Sally Ride, the first female astronaut to go to space, homing in on the 27-year romantic relationship Ride shielded from a homophobic public eye.

Were the federal government to be auditing the lineup, in this newly censored era, these films would likely trip multiple

alarms—not because they are narrow in identity scope but because they are representatively broad.

This year’s thematic program, curated by filmmaker Yance Ford, is titled “The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry,” and the films both within Ford’s program (a set of eight features and three shorts that date back to 1956) and outside of it seem to thrive in a keen inquiry that sprawls borders.

The festival lineup ranges from films looking at the ordinary lives of Norwegian high school students (FOLKTALES) to films looking through the eyes of a Russian teacher exposing propaganda (Mr. Nobody Against Putin). One film untangles the legacy of the sex sting operation show To Catch a Predator (Predators); another tracks the reintroduction of brown bears in a rural French Pyrenees community (The Shepherd and the Bear).

Tillery has now been with the festival since its early days—starting as an intern in 2004 and serving as a director since 2008. One of the best parts of the festival, she says, is looking out into an audience and spotting documentary subjects.

“Our culture is so celebrity focused,” she says. “When we can hold real people up in that sort of light—that feels really meaningful to me.”

The net that Full Frame casts might be global, but its anchor is decidedly local.

Where other festivals tend to sprawl across zip codes, Full Frame is geographically dense, snugly tucked inside the Carolina Theatre and adjoining Durham Convention Center, lending the plaza in between the two the lively air of a European square. By design, events tend to have an unfussy Southernness compared to other festivals—the closing night menu, for instance, is always barbecue. Since the festival’s early days, prolific local restaurateur Giorgios Bakatsias has catered events, creating a vibe of familial continuity between years.

“Having hotels within walking distance, having so many great restaurants in Durham, being an exciting place to just walk around is part of the national and international draw of the festival,” says Foster, the festival’s co-director.

Filmmaker Ryan White (Pamela, a Love Story; Good Night Oppy) has screened multiple documentaries at Full Frame and is returning this year to screen Come See Me in the Good Light, a film about spoken word poet Andrea Gibson.

“I personally think it’s the best film festival of the year,” White says of Full Frame.

“It’s small enough and concentrated enough that it’s easy to manage, but the programming team does such a great job with the

Sadie Tillery and Emily Foster, the co-festival directors of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

lineup that it’s one-stop shopping to see most of the best documentaries of the year.”

In the years when the festival has not been held—as with the pause between 2020 and 2023 that fans feared would be permanent—downtown businesses have felt the impact. When local chef and restaurant owner Gray Brooks spoke to the INDY about the closure of Jack Tar in 2023, he recalled the lively foot traffic that the festival and events like it brought in prior to COVID-19: “Half the time we were full, it was people with lanyards around their necks,” he said.

But the businesses that did survive lean pandemic years, like another of Brooks’s downtown Durham ventures, Pizzeria Toro, are beloved by returning festivalgoers.

“There are people who have raved for years about the kale salad at Toro,” Foster says.

Foster and Tillery have tried to build on the community feel by holding free events throughout the year. This includes summer screenings in Durham Central Park (last year’s had an unlucky streak of summer storms: “I applaud the 70-ish people who braved the rain,” Foster laughs) and the Winter Road Show series, which returned this year, for the first time since 2019, at the Cary Theater.

At this year’s festival, there are four free screenings (SALLY and The Apollo, as well as two free outdoor screenings in Durham Cen-

tral Park), and a series of free-to-the-public “speakeasies”—intimate craft talks with filmmakers. Full Frame’s fellows program draws in students from universities ranging from NC Central University and Duke to NYU, giving students up-close access to filmmakers.

Ryan White first attended Full Frame as a freshman at Duke.

“I was rubbing shoulders with all of my heroes from the documentary field and it felt like heaven,” White says. “I kept going back every year, and the film festival became like my de facto film school.”

It’s not easy for a large event, especially one inheriting the strained town-and-gown relationship of Duke and Durham, to be of a place and not just in a place, but over the years, Full Frame has struck that balance.

Maybe that is because, as curator Ford wrote in a press release for the festival, Full Frame exists as a singular space outside of market pressures, “[allowing] the work itself to drive conversation.”

In Hollywood, documentaries operate on the margins. While this doesn’t make the genre impervious to market forces— streaming wars, AI sludge, and unmet union demands have landed the industry in crisis— it makes them less vulnerable. Documentaries are used to being underestimated.

“Here, audiences and filmmakers engage with documentary as an evolving, urgent

practice, creating an environment for meaningful dialogue that lingers long after the festival ends,” Ford wrote. “I hope this program inspires viewers not just to watch, but to engage—to sit with discomfort, question assumptions, and approach the present moment with fresh urgency and nuance.”

Take No Other Land, a recent documentary directed by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers that follows the destruction of West Bank villages by Israeli forces.

Despite the documentary’s popularity on the international circuit, no American distributor would take the film. You cannot find it on Amazon or Netflix nor on any of the vowel-forward streaming platforms no one has heard of. Despite such staunch obstacles, just two weeks ago No Other Land managed to score the Oscar for best documentary—a testament to the potency of its message and (possibly, optimistically) audience eagerness for films that cut through the noise and show something real.

“The images are bad for us,” a first-term Donald Trump said of televised photos of crying children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Bad for us, or hard for us?

At their best, the documentary arts fill a gap unmet by print journalism or Hollywood, reeling our fragmented attention back to a real-life subjects, big or small. Also

at their best: documentaries of Full Frame’s caliber are not just blunt, virtuous objects of imagery—they have storytelling range, vision, depth. Many ways of seeing are revealed by examining many ways of being.

Two of the films in Ford’s 2025 thematic program point to this: Harun Farocki’s 1969 short Inextinguishable Fire and Brett Story’s 2016 feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

The former takes viewers to a Dow Chemical plant in Michigan during the Vietnam War that manufactures napalm. (“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes,” a voice-over states. “You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.”) The 12 landscapes of the latter, meanwhile, don’t feature actual prisons—instead, they are prismatic snapshots of places impacted by the incarceration industry. Just as in real life, what happens just out of eyesight shapes our stories just as much as what is directly in view.

An appetite for those stories has kept crowds coming back to the Carolina Theatre every spring.

“To enjoy an indie or documentary film, you don’t need an education in film,” Foster says. “You don’t need a degree in the medium to appreciate it. You just come into the movies, open and ready.” W

A magnetic scheduling board sits in the office of Sadie Tillery

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

The Center for Documentary Studies building.

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

In the Spotlight

At this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, 49 films will screen across four days. Here are five we’re especially excited to catch.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

Documentaries take many years and false starts to make, so they can’t ever be a true 1:1 mirror of the moment they’re released in. On the other hand, documentaries often have the uncanny ability to speak to the future.

So what do the 49 films in this year’s Full Frame Documentary Festival—held in downtown Durham, April 3-6, this year— tell us about our current moment?

Thematically, several films orbit the past and present politics of Eastern Europe; four are about Ukraine. Several are about democracy. Several more are about climate change, if by different names. One is about childhood fears and the lurking shadows around the corner, imaginary or real (or, both at the same time?); others invite deep contemplation about sexuality, illness, and aging. Two kinds of bears, both quite different, have titular prominence. Romance factors, if in lowercase. All films, ultimately, tell us a little more about the world we live in. It’s difficult to narrow down a list of must-see movies, but here, at least, are five that we especially hope to catch at the festival’s 27th year.

I’M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE

“Now is not the right time for art, my mother says. But why can’t I live on my own terms?” a narrator intones, as a series of black-and-white photographs flash onto the screen over heavy, propulsive electronic music. Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková (“the Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague”) guides audiences through 1968, a seminal year in her personal life, as she explores underground scenes and her sexuality—as well as a turbulent, newly communist Czechoslovakia. Raw footage and

poetic voiceovers from Jarcovjáková’s diary promise to give an intimate look into one of Europe’s most important photographers.

THE LAST PARTERA

It’s fitting that this documentary, a portrait of Costa Rican centenarian Doña Miriam Elizondo, has its world premiere at Full Frame: the team behind it—Victoria Bouloubasis (a former INDY food editor), Ned Phillips, and Pilar Timpane—are all based in Durham. With crisp, vivid, intimate cinematography, The Last Partera chronicles Elizondo’s final years, as she passes on her knowledge as the last traditional midwife in Costa Rica to a new generation eager for women-centered health care.

MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN

All right, this is the film I’m probably the most excited to see at Full Frame. While both the title and the film’s intro posit this almost as a quirky mockumentary-style project (“In this moment, I have no idea the trouble I’m about to cause for myself”), the task that fun-loving protagonist Pasha Talankin undertakes in Mr. Nobody Against Putin is incredibly risky: to film the Russian primary school he works at as it transforms, amid the war, into a site of nationalist propaganda and military recruitment. Cue the

The Last Partera PHOTO COURTESY THELASTPARTERA.COM

Mr. Nobody Against Putin PHOTO COURTESY CZECH FILM CENTER

I’m Not Everything I Want to Be PHOTO COURTESY OF SQUARE EYES FILM

children marching. Cue the children practicing with toy guns. Apparently, Talankin initially planned to resign from his position in protest when the war began, but then realized that it was an opportunity to tell the school’s story—and maybe a bigger story? When it premiered earlier this year, the film won Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award.

HELEN AND THE BEAR

The man—“the bear”—that producer Alix Blair’s free-spirited Aunt Helen married 40 years ago looked like a dashing Hollywood actor, was her Republican boss, and was 26 years her senior. Not, in other words, a likely match. This is exactly the kind of documentary I love, one that takes an ordinary (albeit, a uniquely fascinating) subject close to a filmmaker’s life and, through care and close attention, uses it as a conduit for universal questions. What makes a love story, a life? Helen’s beautifully scripted diaries and home video footage propel the story through the years and the couple’s complicated marriage, as Helen wrestles with questions about her sexuality and what life after her much-older husband might look like. This film also has local ties: Blair is a Duke alumna, and producer Rebekah Fergusson is a Center for Documentary Studies alumna and current Durham resident.

THE FABULOUS GOLD HARVESTING MACHINE

Find a way to watch the trailer, even if you can’t make it to this screening: The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine looks to be a beautiful, fascinating glimpse of aging and a distant way of life in the Chilean Tierra del Fuego. A character-driven documentary, the film follows Toto, a 60-year-old whose health is failing after 40 grueling years working in the mines. Enter Jorge, his cowboy son who embarks on a project that sounds like it’s out of a fairy tale: building a gold-harvesting machine that could make their lives easier. The warmth and commitment the two have for each other makes for a compelling documentary subject. W

4/10 THU Stephen Wilson Jr. CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM

3/26 WED Your Neighbors W/ DREAMFONE

4/11 FRI The Wellermen

4/12 SAT Husbands W/ JAGUAR SUN KINGS

3/19 WED Geographer W/ LILY KERSHAW

3/21 FRI Riki W/ DONZII, DELORES GALORE

3/23 SUN Horsegirl W/ FREE RANGE, VERITY DEN

3/24 MON Weatherday W/ TRUTH CLUB

3/27 THU Chanel Beads W/ MORE EAZE, LILLY FLOWER

4/8 TUE Bella White LOCAL 506

3/19 WED Ashes to Amber W/ CURRENT BLUE

3/24 MON Heart to Gold W/ ROSARY, WEYMOUTH, BUCK SWOPE

3/30 SUN Cloakroom W/ NAPALM CRUISER, APPLEFIELD

4/4

3/28 FRI Maggie Antone W/ MOLLY FORBES

COMING

SOON

Agriculture, Alien Ant Farm, Andrew Duhon, Annie DiRusso, Archer Oh, Bailey Spinn, Bambara, Bartees

Strange, Being Dead, Bella White, Beth Stelling, Boston Manor, Brett Dennen, River Whyless, Brother Ali, Chanel Beads, Cloakroom, Cochise, Cold, Cults, Daisy The Great, DeathbyRomy, Florist, Full of Hell, Harms Way, greek, Heart Attack Man, Heart to Gold, High Vis, Horse Jumper of Love, CAT'S CRADLE

more shows listed at

Signs and Wonders

Talking with author Adam Sobsey about his new memoir A Jewish Appendix, which takes him around the world and back to a Durham wine bar in search of belonging, nuance, and open doors.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

The snow that fell on Durham last month postponed Adam Sobsey’s reading at the Jewish Book Festival. This seemed oddly fitting for a writer whose new memoir, A Jewish Appendix, chronicles a series of detours and denied entries—both physical barriers and the more elusive boundaries of Jewish identity.

In A Jewish Appendix, Sobsey recounts a three-month journey through Europe that starts as “a sort of speculative ancestry tour” and evolves into something more profound. The book opens with a coincidence—hours after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Sobsey wakes up with acute stomach pain and has his appendix removed. Six months later, while visiting Romania, his ancestral homeland, he’s struck by a mysterious, “kaleidoscopic” illness that disappears the day he leaves

the country.

The memoir weaves together these physical synchronicities with Sobsey’s internal identity reckoning. Though born to Jewish parents, Sobsey wasn’t raised practicing Judaism. In one poignant scene, he sits in a synagogue while others chant in Hebrew, experiencing it as “that type of dream in which everyone knows what is happening and what to do except you.”

As a Jewish reader, I found that Sobsey’s memoir defies easy categorization, exploring the nuances and contradictions of heritage and belonging in their full complexity. Sobsey’s elegant, visually rich prose renders scenes with cinematic clarity and transforms small observations into moments of revelation. Early in his journey, staying in an Albanian apartment where all 12 astrological signs were

painted on the walls, he reflects that his trip had “commenced under a good sign—under all of them.” Describing his great-grandfather, whom he called “Grape Zaidie” (a childhood mishearing of “Great Zaidie”), Sobsey notes the “dark pigment we all inherited from him”: a “deep vegetal brown that was almost purple, like a tobacco stain stained again with red wine.”

The image resonates beyond family resemblance, evoking Delafia, the Durham wine bar where Sobsey works as a bartender, in a city built on tobacco—threads of inheritance and place woven together in unexpected ways.

The book also carries qualities of an adventure story: lines like “I threw a few things in my daypack and set out in total darkness” gave me a feeling of childlike wonder when reading.

Ahead of his rescheduled reading at Jewish for Good on March 21, we met at Delafia for a wide-ranging conversation about illness as metaphor, the weight of Holocaust remembrance, the current Middle East crisis, and the thin lines between belonging and exclusion.

INDY: Your memoir discusses a feeling of being sort of disconnected from Judaism as someone who was born Jewish but wasn’t raised practicing. Another theme, at least as I interpreted it, is that there’s always some meaning that can be harvested from synchronicities. With those two things in mind, I was curious if you had thoughts on the fact that we were supposed to be doing this interview at the Jewish community center, and that your reading there got postponed so instead we’re doing it here at Delafia.

“I didn’t have any armor up physically or psychically,” writes Adam Sobsey, author of A Jewish Appendix: A Memoir, of a trip to Romania to explore his heritage.

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

ADAM SOBSEY: My daily life has not changed radically as a result of this trip to the place my great-grandparents came from, or writing this book about my trip. I feel very transformed inside and very different in the way my eyes see the world, and in the way I feel placed in the world as a result of reckoning with being Jewish. I think I do know what you mean in the sense that so much of the experience that I had while we were overseas and in some of the other little fragments of the episodes of the book had to do with feeling denied access: gates across things, not being allowed entry, exclusionary senses that I had about things. I was also reading a lot of W. G. Sebald while I was writing the book. I published a longish essay about him during the editing period of my manuscript, actually. His work tends to make pretty heavy weather out of synchronicities and coincidences. I may have been borrowing some of that unintentionally. And it is funny that they were opening the door to me at the Jewish community center, and then the snow came along and closed the door.

I’m interested to hear what you think the sickness that you experienced in Romania was.

I don’t think it corresponded to any fixed diagnosis. I think it’s probably at least partly the case that at that point I’d been traveling for two months in some fairly rough places, and just asking a lot of my body to manage the daily demands of running to a bus in the hot weather or walking 10 miles in whatever place.

But what I think I got was—or what I should say is, what I think I was vulnerable to—was a huge susceptibility to what I was about to confront. I didn’t have any armor up physically or psychically. And in place after place across Europe before we even got to Romania, I was already encountering these other things about Jewish heritage and Jewish identity that I wasn’t even really looking for. So it was kind of like the whispers were already there.

There’s some level of metanarrative in the book. At times, you jump in and tell us things about your writing process: for instance, that you could only remember three of the four Hebrew letters that are on a dreidel, and that you had to look up what the fourth letter is.

Things like acknowledging not remembering the dreidel letters had to do mostly with making it clear that I really was raised so unobservant that I couldn’t even remember

one of the letters on the dreidel. Which in my mind had something to do with all of the places of omission and absence and disavowal in some places that we ran across in Romania—that there are these things that should be there and that should be in memory and are not.

I took a number of things out of the book that were also more explicit about its creation, because it’s not really about that. But I think some of the vestigial traces are about that acknowledgment that I didn’t only not feel like I was Jewish until I went to Romania; I think to some degree, I also didn’t come to terms with my identity as a writer until I went there.

In the memoir, there’s a part where you examine the phrase “We will not forget”—the slogan often used in Holocaust remembrance ceremonies and memorials. You write, “It’s a phrase that seems so clear but when I think about it, it isn’t. Who are ‘we’?” My first thought was like, maybe the Jews.

It’s one of those phrases that’s so vague, you can use it almost any way you want. It can actually be—like so much language around Jews—construed antisemitically, because it separates out an event and a community which is itself always subject to exclusion.

That phrase has just always made my teeth hurt a little bit whenever I heard it. There’s a line in my book about the idea that “we will not forget” can actually be sort of a pretext for more violence.

That reminds me—I recently went down a rabbit hole and found a Jacobin article that opens with “It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and Halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice.”

It goes on to quote an essay by Phillip Lopate: “In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology. That one tragic event should be viewed as standing outside, above history, and its uniqueness defended and proclaimed, seems very much like the Passion of Christ.”

In your memoir, you have a quick line about walking past the Museum

of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, which “describes itself as ‘A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.’” You write, “Why was a museum of Jewish heritage actually a Holocaust memorial? Was Jewish heritage synonymous with Jewish slaughter?”

In an essay I wrote about A Real Pain [for the Los Angeles Review of Books] I reference an essay by Dara Horn called “Fictional Dead Jews” in which she deplores the disproportionate amount of Jewish literature these days that’s basically uplifting stories about the Holocaust. And that dovetails with what Lopate is saying—like we can find some strange sort of salvation in the destruction of a third of the Jews on earth. It wasn’t until I read Horn’s essay that I realized how disingenuous that has always struck me. We actually can’t use the Holocaust to prove to ourselves that we can be saved by it in some way. Salvation is not even really a Jewish thing—that is Christian. So that really helped me understand why I didn’t like Holocaust museums, why the profound need to keep publishing books and movies about it bothered me.

My ancestors left Europe 30 years before the Holocaust. I’m sure I have relatives who died in Romania during World War II, but the people who I know I’m directly descended from were already long settled in America.

In historical time, we are still so close to the end of the Holocaust that it’s still the main thing we’re going to be talking about for a while. Recorded Jewish history goes back more than 3,000 years, and we’re what, 80 years past the end of World War II. We’re still recovering from sickness. It doesn’t surprise me that we have to keep talking about it, or that my book is to some degree an illness memoir. But the Holocaust is not actually part of my story.

I’m aware that we are never very far from the next Jewish problem that can reach a violent place. As soon as you get a group of non-Jews angry about their living conditions, which is how the right wing has operated for the last decade, and blaming everybody else for those living conditions, it’s only a matter of time before Jews are perceived as part of the problem, or blamed for it outright. And we know where that can lead.

I will say that I got my passport renewed last year, just in case.

I just got mine renewed two weeks ago.

Yeah. I mean, I still had six months on mine. But there’s a lot of countries that

won’t let you in if you don’t have some minimum number of months or whatever. So I have 10 years on that thing.

I was reminded of Delafia at certain points while reading your memoir. You talk about Albanian hospitality and feeling like everywhere you went, “access was granted, doors were opened, sustenance was provided, payment was waived.” I remembered, when I was here last year talking to you about Delafia, you said something about kind of leaving the door open all the time for whoever wanders in, and not being too meticulous about how much you’re pouring and charging. Do you see parallels between the journey that you share in the book and your day-to-day life in hospitality?

Certainly, the instinct to have community around me is a big part of why I do this work, and making people feel welcome and attended to and valued is the main reason that I have been in this business for as long as I have.

Also, frankly, you spend so much time writing, it’s a very solitary act. There’s been a need to have a nonsolitary part of my life that working in this business has always satisfied. That’s probably most of it, but it’s interesting you’re asking me this question. For a pretty long time, my life in the restaurant business and my life as a writer, I worked pretty hard to keep separate from each other. This is the first place where I have not felt the need to do that at all. That I, in fact, tell people that I have this book coming out. I tell them what it’s about. I tell them I’m a writer, that I also write plays.

In the book, there’s a thing about maybe wanting to write a play about King Saul. I did write a play about King Saul. I’m about to go do some revisions to it, and I wanted to have an event here, because I wanted to be able to tell everybody—mostly my bar regulars, but anybody else who wants to come—that this place has felt like home to me in all of the different parts of my life, that the writing life and the “What kind of wine would you like?” life actually don’t feel separate.

I think that’s definitely connected to having gotten closer to my actual identity as a Jew over several years, since we went to Romania. I have no doubt that that’s part of it. W

WED 3/19

MUSIC

Cameron Whitcomb, Ben Cotrill 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Reggie Watts 8:30 p.m. Motorco, Durham.

Secret Monkey Weekend, The Mad Starlings 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Sings Like Hell with Peter Case and Sid Griffin 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

Beetlejuice Mar. 18-23, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Being Chaka Mar. 13-30, various times. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

Confederates by Dominique Morisseau Mar. 5-23, various times. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill.

The WLW Wednesday Open Mic Comedy Hour 8 p.m. Club ERA, Durham.

THUR 3/20

MUSIC

Wasted Major 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

STAGE

Panoramic Dance Project: Reframed Mar. 20-21, Stewart Theatre, Raleigh.

PAGE

Emily Feng—Let Only Red Flowers Bloom 5:30 p.m. Rubenstein Arts Center, Ruby Lounge, Durham.

Sophie Lewis—Enemy Feminisms 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

FRI 3/21

MUSIC

4 Phones Entertainment Presents: Equinox Fest 10:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Beloved Collective Presents: Bloom 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Cosmic Charlie 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Dare to Bare: A Queer Lingerie Party 10 p.m. Club ERA, Durham.

Geoffrey Keezer & Yvonnick Prené “Jobim’s World” 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Heather Mae, Fruit Snack 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

John Tejada 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: Mozart & Mahler

Mar. 21, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh. Mar. 23, 7:30 p.m. Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill.

of Montreal, Whoop! 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Ray Bull, Tyler Berrier 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

STAGE

Comedy Show with Mark Chalifoux and Rashika Jaipuriar 8 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

Hush Hush Fridays at 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Marc Maron: All In 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Morning after Grace Mar. 21–Apr. 6. Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh.

SCREEN

Cosmic Rays Film Festival Mar. 21-23, various times. Chelsea Theater, Chapel Hill.

PAGE

Adam Sobsey—A Jewish Appendix 10:30 a.m. Jewish for Good, Durham.

SAT 3/22

MUSIC

16th Annual WISER A Cappella Jam 7:30 p.m. Durham Academy Upper School, Durham.

Adulting Presents: Dusk Disko 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Brooklyn Brass Queens 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle presents: La Vida Breve Mar. 22-23, various times. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

The Conjure Presents: House of Blk Dance Night 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Gimme Gimme Disco 9 p.m. Motorco, Durham.

The Jesse Miller Quartet 6 p.m. Lapin Bleu, Chapel Hill.

JZM Brazilian Jazz Trio 7 p.m. Succotash, Durham.

Kruger Brothers 7:30 p.m. Garner Performing Arts Center, Garner.

Last Dinosaurs, Tipling Rock, Jasper Bones 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Los Tigres del Norte 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Cameron Whitcomb performs at Lincoln Theatre on Wednesday, March 19. PHOTO COURTESY OF LINCOLN THEATRE

3/21-3/23 @ CAT'S CRADLE

CAT'S CRADLE

MARCH

3/21 FR: OF MONTREAL: THE SUNLANDIC TWINS 20TH ANNIV. TOUR W/ WHOOP!

3/22 SA: LAST DINOSAURS W/TIPLING ROCK, JASPER BONES

3/23 SU: THE HARD QUARTET W/SHARP PINS, THE UNMASTERED MASTERS

3/25 TU: PATTERSOON HOOD W/ LYDIA LOVELESS APRIL

4/1 TU: CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAHPERFORMING THE DEBUT ALBUM!

4/4 FR: JOHN VINCENT III W/ MURDO MITCHELL

4/10 TH: STEPHEN WILSON JR. SOLD OUT

4/11 FR: TAN & SOBER GENTLEMEN, DRIFTWOOD

4/12 SA: THE WAR AND TREATY W/TIERA KENNEDY

4/16 WE: RUBBLEBUCKET W/ CAPYAC

4/17 TH: BACK TO BACK TO BLACK: THE AMY WINEHOUSE CELEBRATION

4/18 FR: MIKE W/SIDESHOW, NIONTAY, EL COUSTEAU

4/19 SA: TANK AND THE BANGAS W/ ELLIOTT SKINNER, DJ ZEUS

4/21 MO: FREE THROW W/ BEN QUAD, HARRISON GORDON

4/23 TH: JENNIFER CURTIS VIOLIN W/ FRIENDS FROM NC SYMPHONY: SCHOENBERG: TRANSFIGURED NIGHT

4/25 SA: DARREN KIELY W/JESSE FOX

4/27 SU: GANG OF FOUR SOLD OUT

4/28 MO: SAWYER HILL W/THE CRITICALS

MAY

5/1 TH: TROUSDALE

5/5/2 FR: NAPALM DEATH AND MELVINS W/ WEEDEATER, DARK SKY BURIAL

5/9 FR: NICOTINE DOLLS

5/10 SA: ELECTRIC SIX W/ MESSUR CHUPS

5/11 SU: JIMMY EAT WORLD SOLD OUT

5/16 FR:

5/13 TU: LEPROUS W/ WHEEL

4/4 @ CAT'S CRADLE JOHN VINCENT III W/ MURDO MITCHELL

5/17 SA: LUCIUS W/ VICTORIA CANAL

5/29 TH: THE LAST REVEL JUNE

6/2 MO: PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT

6/7 SA: REVEREND HORTON HEAT W/ NATHAN & THE ZYDECO CHA CHAS

6/14 SA: THE LEMON TWIGS

JULY

7/11 FR: WHITE DENIM

7/23 WE: BRONCHO AUGUST

8/22 FR: BETH STELLING SEPTEMBER

9/3 WE: THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE OCTOBER

10/15 WE: DESTROYER: DAN’S BOOGIE TOUR

10/16 TH: SAM BURCHFIELD & THE SCOUNDRELS

10/18 SA: INFINITY SONG WORLD TOUR CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM

3/19 WE: PETER CASE & SID GRIFFIN

3/20,21,22: CARRBORO DJANGO REINHARDT FEST

3/23 SU: BE LOUD! SOPHIE HIGH SCHOOL MUSIC SHOWCASE (4 PM)

3/25 TU: ALEXSUCKS W/ REHASH*

3/26 WE: YOUR NEIGHBORS W/ DREAMFONE

3/27 TH: CASSANDRA JENKINS W/ MERCE LEMON

3/28 FR: ¡TUMBAO! W/ ELORA DASH, AFRICA UNPLUGGED

3/29 SA: PALMYRA W/ CLOVER-LYNN

3/31 MO: ALAN SPARHAWK (OF LOW) W/CIRCUIT DES YEUX

4/1 TU: POM POM SQUAD

4/2 WE: WILLI CARLISLE

4/3 TH: WIM TAPLEY

4/4 FR: LIZ LONGLEY

4/6 SU: CHASE PETRA W/ SMALL CRUSH, SORRY MOM

4/9 WE: TEEN MORTGAGE W/ BABE HAVEN

4/10 TH: THE CRYSTAL CASINO BAND W/ MELLOW SWELLS

4/11 FR: ANDMOREAGAIN PRESENTS: THE WELLERMEN

4/12 SA: ANDMOREAGAIN PRESENTS: HUSBANDS

4/15 TU: MERCURY REV W/ RYLEY WALKER, LIZ LAMERE

4/17 TH: THE WILDMANS

4/18 FR: JOHN HOWIE JR AND THE ROSEWOOD BLUFF W/ SEVERED FINGERS, DAVID PRATHER 4/19 SA: FUST

4/20 SU: CHEEKFACE W/ PACING

4/21 MO: THE MYSTERY LIGHTS, LEVITATION ROOM

4/22 TU: LOWERTOWN W/ SWEET93

4/24 TH: AN EVENING WITH THE TANNAHILL WEAVERS (SEATED SHOW)

4/25 FR: PETER HOLSAPPLE ALBUM RELEASE SHOW W/ FLORENCE DORE

4/26 SA: SLOW TEETH ALBUM RELEASE SHOW W/ BEN HACKETT

5/1 TH: PORTICO W/ JOHNNY SUNRISE, DAVIE CIRCLE

5/2 FR: EVENING ELEPHANTS W/FAZE WAVE

5/3 SA: BLUE CACTUS ALBUM RELEASE W/ ALEXA ROSE

5/4 SU: PHONEBOY W/ INOHA

5/7 WE: BRIGITTE CALLS ME BABY W/ COR DE LUX

5/9 FR: THEM COULEE BOYS

5/10 SA: CHRISTOPHER OWENS

5/13 TU: L.A. WITCH W/ DAILSTAR

5/15 TH: BODIE W/ GRACE BINION

5/16 FR: ANDREW DUHON

5/20 TU: MELISSA CARPER W/ TODD DAY WAIT

5/21 FR: HOLY FAWN W/WISH QUEEN

5/22 TH: PET SYMMETRY

5/31 SA: MEI SEMONES

6/14 SA: THE ARCADIAN WILD W/ DALLAS UGLY

6/20 FR: LAUREN SANDERSON

7/2 WE: MC CHRIS W/ SWELL RELL

7/13 SU: SAMATHA CRAIN

8/26 TU: MOUNTAIN GRASS UNIT HAW RIVER BALLROOM (SAX) 4/5 SA: THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH W/THE STILL TIDE 4/18 FR: THE DIP W/ZACH PERSON 4/25 FR: JULIEN BAKER & TORRES

Pop Up Chorus Broadway! Songs from Wicked 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

Renaissance Disko

10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Sam Wolfe 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Saturday Night Dance Party 9:30 p.m. The Velvet Hippo, Durham.

A Spring Concert: The Travelin’ Mercies 4 p.m. St. Mary’s Chapel, Hillsborough.

STAGE

7th Annual wimmin@work

2 p.m. Hayti Heritage Center, Durham.

Actors Improv Theater: Word Jazz 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Advanced Study Class Show: Narrative Improv

7 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

SCREEN

Pittsboro Courthouse

Fire 15th Anniversary Documentary 7:30 p.m. Pittsboro Courthouse, Pittsboro.

SUN 3/23

MUSIC

Be Loud! Sophie High School Music Showcase 4 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Dunums, Kill the Buddha, Megabitch 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Explosions in the Sky: The End Tour 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

The Hard Quartet, Sharp Pins, Unmastered Masters 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Kanin Wren’s Taylor Swift Experience 7 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Kodo: One Earth Tour 7:30 p.m. Page Auditorium, Durham.

Phil Cook New Album Listening Party: Appalachia Borealis 3 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Simone Baron 7 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Zeta, Wolves & Wolves & Wolves & Wolves, Treasure Pains 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

STAGE

Superbloom Comedy Show with Mike Lebovitz 7 p.m. The Pour House Music Hall, Raleigh.

SCREEN

With Babies and Banners: Documentary and Discussion 2:30 p.m. Raleigh United Mutual Aid Hub, Raleigh.

MON 3/24

MUSIC

Archer Oh! 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

PAGE

Eleanor Goymer—The Plot Twist 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

TUES 3/25 WED 3/26

MUSIC

ALEXSUCKS, rehash*

8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Lydia Loveless, Patterson Hood 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

North Carolina Repertory Jazz Orchestra 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

PAGE

Lauren Christensen— Firstborn 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

Ally J on the Roof 7:30 p.m. The Durham Hotel, Durham.

Maddie Zahm: The Sad and Sexy Tour 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Titties and Trombones: Franny Starlight and the Brass Boudoir 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Your Neighbors, dreamfone 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

The Trip to Bountiful Various times, Mar. 26–Apr. 6. Theatre Raleigh Arts Center, Raleigh.

PAGE

Travis Mulhauser— The Trouble Up North 6:30 p.m. Letters Community Bookshop, Durham.

THUR 3/27

MUSIC

Brooks & Dunn 7 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Cassandra Jenkins, Merce Lemon 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Tombstone Poetry, Old Star, Charlie Paso 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Wilder Woods: The Curioso Tour 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

PAGE

Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour—LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Silent Book Club at Letters 6 p.m. Letters Community Bookshop, Durham.

Wilder Woods performs at the Ritz, Raleigh, on Thursday, March 27. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RITZ

FRI 3/28 SAT 3/29

MUSIC

Angrybaby 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

The Auxiliary Listening Party 8 p.m. perfect lovers, Durham.

Dreamforia Presents:

Golden Era EDM 9 p.m Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Gay Agenda Presents: Last Friday 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

High + Tight: A Lifetime of Soul, Funk, and Disco 8 p.m. Wolfe & Porter, Raleigh.

Nicole Mitchell Ensemble 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

¡Tumbao!, Elora Dash, Africa Unplugged 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

Hush Hush Fridays at 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Rainbow Dance Company Mar. 28-29, various times.

Garner Performing Arts Center, Garner.

MUSIC

8th Annual KoreaFest

2025 10 a.m. NC State Fairgrounds, Raleigh.

140bpm 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Gavin Adcock 7 p.m. Mar. 29-30. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Maple Stave, Tapes on Ten 6:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Palmyra, Clover-Lynn 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

POP: A 2010s Party with Drag, Burlesque, DJs and More 10:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Sarah Gooch and Alba Pujals Quintet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

STAGE

Heather McMahan: The Bamboozled Tour 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Trisha Paytas: The Eras of Trish Tour 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

SUN 3/30

MUSIC

Daniela Liebman Piano Concert 7 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Live Jazz with Joseph Silvers 11 a.m. Lanza’s Cafe, Carrboro.

Paul Thorn 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

MON 3/31

MUSIC

Alan Sparhawk 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

TUES 4/1

MUSIC

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Jenny Scheinman Presents “All Species Parade” 7 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Neal Francis: Return to Zero Tour 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Queer Country Night with Line Dancing and Country Karaoke 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

PAGE Sharp, Smart & Southern: A Reading and Panel for National Poetry Month 6 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

The Nicole Mitchell Ensemble performs at Sharp 9 Gallery on Friday, March 28. PHOTO COURTESY OF SHARP 9 GALLERY

Alan Sparhawk performs at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room on Monday, March 31. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

SU | DO | KU

© Puzzles by Pappocom

Difficulty level: HARD

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you’re stumped, find the answer keys for these puzzles and archives of previous puzzles (and their solutions) at indyweek.com/puzzles-page or scan this QR code for a link. Best of luck, and have fun!

RELEASE DATE—Sunday, March 16, 2025

Los Angeles Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Patti Varol

EMPLOYMENT

Learning Scientist

Learning Scientist. MetaMetrics, Inc. (Durham, NC) F/T. Act as “go-to” expert for departmental head/sr leadership for educational/psychometric research. Reqs.: Master’s deg or foreign equiv in Comp Sci, Info Science, or English Language Edu + 1 yr exp. Exp to incl dvlpg/ evaluating formative/ summative language tests, computer-delivered language tests, web applications (language testing purposes). This is a telecommuting position w/ remote benefit from various unanticipated locations throughout the U.S. Mail resumes to 800 Taylor St., Ste 102A, Durham, NC 27701.

Senior Solutions Architect

Senior Solutions Architect sought by ePlus Technology, inc. (Durham, NC) to serve as focused technical lead & sales engineer for ePlus product/ service solutions, supporting regional sales team to drive revenue creation. Travel 10-15% to customer sites in U.S. Work from home permitted as client needs allow. Send resume & cover letter to Talent@eplus.com with job title in subject line.

Project Controls Professional

Project Controls Professional at Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc., Cary, NC and various unanticipated worksites in US: gather and investigate weekly construction progress. Salary: $123,656- $129,550 / yr. Apply at:https:// careers.jacobs.com/en_US/careers/JobDetail/ Project-Controls-Professional/23980.

Software Engineer

Software Engineer, IQVIA Inc. Durham, NC. May telecom anywhre in US. Wrk ind & drive arch guidelines w/in teams. Salary Rnge: $126,696$148,800/yr. Reqs at lest Bach in EE/CS/IT/rel/ equiv. Reqs 2 yrs SW dev exp incl 2 yrs: wrk on Salesforce apps; wrk w/ Apex scriptng; create apps w/ JAVA; bld apps w/ Lightning web componts; bld custm objcts, lookup rel; integr Salesforce w/ othr apps; define sec in Salesforce. M - F 8a-5p. Apply: res to: usrecruitment@iqvia.com & ref#112603.

Expert Software Engineer

Expert Software Engineer, Altera Digital Health Inc., Raleigh, NC. May teleco in US & rept to Raleigh HQ. Perf exprt lvl specifictn, design, code, test & doc in hlthcare SW dev & maint. Req Bach in CS/ CE/ Electrcl / Electrnc Engg / rel / equiv. Req 7 yrs hlthcare SW engg exp to incl 6 yrs: OOP; ASP .NET MVC, ASP .NET MVC CORE & C#; 5 yrs: .Net Frmwrk & .Net Core Frmwrk; Rest API, WCF, Queue & SOAP Srvcs; RDB; 4 yrs: AD FS; Angular; HTML/CSS; Javascpt, Jquery & TypeScrpt; Nunit Test; 3 yrs: Cloud Tech (Azure); Srvc-Now; 2 yrs: Vers Ctrl (GIT & TFS); Entity Frmwrk. Wk M - F, 8a-5p, aft hrs as needed. Apply: res to: resumes@alterahealth.com & ref #113327.

Senior Associate Staf Scientist

IDeaS Inc. seeks Senior Associate Staff Scientist in Cary, NC to contribute to R&D of innovative, market-centric products. Reqs: BS in Comp Sci, Eng, or rel + 3 yrs exp or MS in Comp Sci, Eng, or rel + 1 yr exp or PhD in Comp Sci, Eng, or rel. Exp & skills may be gained during grad degree. May work remotely pursuant to company’s flexible work prgm. For full reqs & to apply visit https://ideas.com/about/careers/ reference Job # 2025-39018.

Senior Customer Success Manager

VitalSource Technologies LLC in Raleigh, NC seeks Senior Customer Success Manager – Latin America to manage customer satisfaction and financial health of customers in Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries, act as liaison sharing information and insights with stakeholders, act as day-to-day point of contact, coordinate with customers, lead customers through project plans. Position requires written and verbal fluency in Spanish to communicate with Spanish speaking customers daily. Position reports to company HQ office in Raleigh, NC. Remote telecommuting position. May telecommute from anywhere in U.S. 100% of time. Position requires international travel in Latin America, Spain and any Spanish speaking countries approx. 25% of time, approx. 5-10 weeks per year for client and team meetings, trainings, conferences, events. See full requirements and apply online at https://get.vitalsource.com/about-us/careers.