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Jonathan Klett’s documentary films ride the crest of anti-authoritarian activism

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The Federal Building in Milwaukee. Midwest Wanderer

It was high noon on April 6, as 9,000 protesters jammed Wisconsin Avenue in front of the Milwaukee Federal Building, still a circuit courthouse. This is grand Romanesque architecture, but today its tall central bell-tower brings to mind Notre Dame Cathedral during the post-Revolution era when the restored Bourbon monarchy was toppled in 1830.

So, no, Victor Hugo’s hunchback bellringer Quasimodo doesn’t swing down from the pealing heights. But Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera Milwaukee, ends her fiery and incisive speech indicting the Trump and Musk administration’s fascist infiltration of American democracy with the exhortation, “Si se puede! Si se puede!”

This translates as “Yes, you can!” — the motto of the United Farmworkers since Cesar Chavez uttered it in 1972. The phrase was born during a famous 25-day fast Chavez undertook to inspire farm workers to believe that their fight for better wages and conditions was possible.

Why does Chavez’s cry resonate today? History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain once said.

That’s why belief in the power of people rising to fight the corrupted powers is a force that echoes across generations. It’s a potent way to keep the idea and energy burning, and political action alive. This so-called “Hands Off!” protest was one of 1,400 in locations across all 50 U.S. states, drawing up to an estimated three to five million participants nationwide, according to the demonstration organizers.

Neumann-Ortiz was captured by rising Milwaukee filmmaker Jonathan Klett, who will have a short film debuted at the Milwaukee Film Festival, May 1 and 3.

Here’s his film of her speech with some reaction shots from the crowd:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIlu3kAumjR/

As Jonathan aptly quotes Christine from her speech:  “We know that resistance is our duty, and we will not let history repeat itself. That we will stand united, and we will beat back fascism and we’re gonna come out of this better than when we started!”

Jonathan adds, “Christine and Voces invite you to join them on May Day (May 1) in a national day of protest and strike. All workers unite.”

Voces de la Fronteras leader Christine Neumann-Ortiz speaks to a crowd on May Day Protest in 2022 in front of the Milwaukee Federal Building, where a “Hands-Off!” protest on April 6, 2025 drew 9,000 people. She invited that crowd to another May Day protest this May 1. Photo: Isiah Holmes, The Wisconsin Examiner

Voces de la Fronteras leader Neumann-Ortiz coudn’t have been a more appropriate speaker, given that Latin-American immigrants are the primary focus of Trump’s largely illegal deportation efforts.

Remember his notorious presidential-run announcement speech in 2015: “ When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Lately Trump’s rhetoric has stooped to, “They are emptying out insane asylums into the United States.” Can you believe this blathering fool?

My thanks to Jonathan Klett for filming and sharing this. He has spent the bulk of his still-burgeoning career as a gifted video journalist and filmmaker rising in visibility by searching out important fights for justice and humane truth.

 

New Milwaukee 3rd District Alderman Alex Brower. Courtesy Milwaukee Leader

At that April protest, Klett also documented the searing speech of Alex Brower, whom I’m proud to say is the new alderman of my own Third Milwaukee district. Brower is also union president of the Milwaukee Substitute Teachers Association, and executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans.

He claims to be “the first socialist” in local government since the famously efficient Milwaukee “sewer socialists,” like Mayor Daniel Hoan, of the 1930s. Brower is loaded with ideas, energy and, I think, vision, including plans to replace We Energies with a collectively-owned power organization. He rang my Riverwest doorbell on election day afternoon, still stumping door-to-door several hours after I voted for him.

Klett also captured Brower’s speech: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIzL8f1R1yE/?igsh=MWlxNG9kN3dvNHlheg%3D%3D

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A bit of full disclosure: Jonathan is the oldest son of this writer’s longtime friends, John and Mary Klett, so if you perceive a certain bias here, so be it.

But I’m trying hard to apply my critical powers to his work and comment accordingly.

He’s got the documentary chops, the commitment and drive. He works for noted reporter and pundit Laura Flanders, and he recently traveled with and documented the hugely popular, cross-country “Fight Oligarchy” tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Part of his footage was telecast on PBS.

Check out some of this doc work and an interview with Bernie Sanders on Jonathan’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Bob.Ross.Lives

Next up for Klett is the Milwaukee Film Festival. He got a short film placed in the international array of cinema on his first-ever entry. The Thin Blue Wave covers the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year, and recent labor and community efforts, and will run at 3 p.m. this Thursday, May 1 at The Downer Theater and 1:15 p.m. Saturday, May 3 at the Oriental Theater, in Milwaukee.

On both days Klett’s The Thin Blue Wave will open for WTO/99, “an immersive archival documentary that reanimates the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ – a clash heard round the world between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle in protest.” WTO/99 is described as a still-timely “meditation on the environment, human rights and labor 25-plus years on in a new moment for activism.”

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A still from the short film “The Thin Blue Wave” by Jonathan Klett. Courtesy Jonathan Klett

Here’s a link to tickets to The Thin Blue Wave and WTO/99: https://mkefilm.org/events/mff25/wto-99 

And here’s a link to Klett’s personal website: https://www.jonathanklett.com/

Protest crowd at Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Photo by Mustafa Hussain/ NBC News

These Klett films are all preludes to his first major feature documentary, The Sacred and the Snake, which he’s been working on for some years. The forthcoming film covers the long seige of protest by Native Americans and allies against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The oil company decides to build right through the reservation, threatening its Missouri River water supply, sacred sites, and the region’s ecological balance. It focuses on a Lakota matriarch, a “Jicarilla Apache/Dine two-spirit person,” and a Cheyenne youth leader who “each discover their power within a movement that echoes worldwide.”

The title image from Klett’s forthcoming full-length documentary “The Sacred and the Snake,” about the two year-long protest against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Courtesy Jonathan Klett

The protests eventually drew thousands of sympathetic supporters and involved confrontations with law enforcement, security personnel, and construction crews, with protesters facing violence and intimidation. In response to the campaign, President Barack Obama’s administration stopped the pipeline’s construction, but this decision was reversed after President Donald Trump took office, and construction was finished in 2017.

Dakota Access Pipeline protesters on their knees before police guard. The protest spurred considerable police bruality, including extensive spraying of mace. Photo by Jonathan Klett from “The Sacred and The Snake.” 

However, the Standing Rock protests raised significant awareness about Indigenous land rights, environmental concerns, and the impact of fossil fuel infrastructure on communities.

Klett’s film carries on that consciousness-raising and uplifting of activism. It tells a heroic story, as gritty and soulful as it is cinematic and dramatic.

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Letter (from a Milwaukee jail of my mind), to Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, on the state of our nation and her own psyche

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The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, DC. Courtesy The Travel Channel
E-mail from Louisa-Loveridge Gallas on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 17, 2021:
Dear friends.
I’m sending on a link to this famous Vietnam speech by MLK I go back to on MLK day, so pivotal in his career. Stunning that he was assassinated a year to the day after. And so brave as he found that he angered and disappointed a number of activists and allies for his stance against the war who felt he should stick to civil rights in the approach and focus he had been taking.
Also I’d like think out loud with you. In a very different way and historical context, I just want to add I am beginning to experience that Biden is being attacked at times, in ways I find irresponsible, for speaking out eloquently and clearly for the moral high road of history in his Georgia speech. I refer not only by Republicans but to comments by prominent Democrats like David Axelrod, Obama’s consultant, on CNN; NYT commentators like Maureen Dowd, and even top legislators like Nancy Pelosi. To name a few. Cheap shots, reaching for a way to insult on minor points, calling out strong opinions disagreed with as unbridled ‘rhetoric’ to name a few.
Of course reasonable, fact-based analysis has to go forward. May everyone be generous and informed as we precede with our critiques even in informal conversation. I know I’m not alone in witnessing that these are perilous times where a compassionate approach to each other and in the political realm is at risk in the zeitgeist of the need to one up, demean too easily and thoughtlessly These are such times of anxiety that inflame disagreements and difference; or enhance compassion fatigue.
I certainly don’t count myself out. I’ve been writing some pretty snarky op Ed comments. And make an occasional fevered phone call, as I did to Axelrod’s office. My fur can rise along with a hiss if a friend or relative isn’t on the same page with my take on all the complexities we are living within. I fail. I’m working on myself. I welcome any thoughts you may have to help me along and no pressure to respond, of course, as so many influences and responsibilities call upon us.
So them’s my thoughts and a link to his speech.
Take care. Be safe.
Sincerely,
Louisa *

Full speech text:  King speech

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Dear Louisa,

How I love your caring, your awareness, your intelligence, your passion, and activist voice. And your brave, insightful analogue between Rev. King and President Biden.
Holy moly (forgive my dated boomer utterance), we all need some empathy and psychological guidance and salve, these days. Perhaps, take some deep, slow breaths, dear friend. Take a long walk beside the empowering tide of our Great Lake, or deep into the woods. Listen to the “conference of the birds,” the way they sing to, and advise, each other. Of danger, yes. They live stressed lives, as vulnerable creatures. And yet, they sing.
If only we could truly fly. Yet we can, in our mind, and drag our lagging, embittered, mudbound spirit aloft, which brings to mind a magnificent Herman Melville quote, from the last paragraph of  Moby-Dick, Chapter 96 “The Try-Works”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
flickr.com 
Only slightly less poetic is Robert F. Kennedy‘s speech in Indianapolis, after annoucing the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day after the tragic event. This video is a part of the speech but very worthy. Robert Kennedy is one of my heroes, more so than JFK.
I read the speech (2 pages) during a troubled, virtually sleepless last night, in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. 1 This is a priceless paperback, to me.
Kennedy quotes his favorite poet Aeschylus, from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy continues: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be whites or they be black.”
I ponder and treasure those thoughts, and rededicate myself to living up to them, to the degree I am able.
(BTW, Bobby Kennedy also had a wit comparable to brother Jack, with fine comic timing — hear his Ball State U speech, following this one on youtube.)
 

Then there’s those who would score “cheap political points” against President Biden, as you protest, Louisa — be they leftist, liberal, centrist, never-Trumpers or far-right Trumpsters.
Biden has only been any office one year, and has laid out perhaps the most ambitious vision and agenda since Lyndon Johnson‘s The Great Society. Yes, he needs to show — and effect — more fight and passion, but he’s getting there, I think. DINO Sens. Manchin and Sinema still sit on the fence like a couple of owls, saying “Who me?” as the 60-vote filibuster looms like the Sword of Damocles, over vastly important social initiatives that are very popular with Americans.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are slithering around from state to state, contriving new voter suppression laws. We need a federal oversight law on voting rights, especially to protect the rights and access of people of color and other disenfrachised citizens.
I am, for the moment, disheartened by all the clamoring special-interest factions of the Democratic Party, each of whom has profoundly legitimate concerns, perhaps most presently voting rights, and a woman’s right to determine her own body. But also the looming apocalypse of climate change… and more, of course.
But a lot of things can happen between now and November’s mid-term elections.

Dear Louisa, as Rev. King says, concluding the sacred but tough-minded speech you quote (echoing Frederick Douglass‘s famous thoughts about “struggle”):

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. The choice is ours. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I believe many tears, sweat and, yes, blood, will commingle with that mighty stream. We are psychically stained by John Kennedy’s blood, from 1963, and by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin’s blood, in 1968, and so many since.

No more, I pray and cry. May America’s profusion of inward-pointed guns desist!

But justice is a hardy soul, I believe. She can swim like a sleek yet powerful fish, or trudge, like a woman or man, long distances, in protest and dissent, which many politicans hear, if loud and pointed enough.

Robert Kennedy quotes Algerian-French author-philosopher Albert Camus as much as anyone in this Make Gentle the Life of This World collection. Camus, I believe, was then addressing the people of Germany, under the Third Reich.

Yet how his words ring on today — when Fascist demagogury and governments sprout weedlike over Mother Earth and here at home — like a great thunderous bell, clanged by mythical Quasimodo in Camus’s Paris, or his very real fellow ringer in Philadelphia, so that the big-shouldered Liberty Bill cracked. 2

Camus wrote:

“This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”

Ringing for truth, justice and love,

Kevin

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* Louisa Loveridge-Gallas is an acclaimed poet, body-mind counseler, op-Ed writer, music lover, and activist. She’s working on a new chapbook of socially-motivated poems, and on a “jazz novel,” set in Madison, Wisonsin. She’s a former long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and now resides in Michigan. 
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas. Courtesy Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
1 Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, 1998, Broadway Books, 42-43
2 The crack ocurred on the Philadelphia bell’s very first test ring in 1752, shipped from a French foundry (those French!), and it was clearly a flawed casting — like the great nation it signifies.
To me, now, the crack now resembles King’s waters of justice rolling down, the mighy stream. 
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