In Oakland, California, we fight to protect our children from lead poisoning in our own homes and schools – confronting over a century of environmental racism.

In 2016, Reuters published an investigative report finding that 3,000 communities in the United States have higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan–including in Oakland, California, where I live. So I went on a journey to figure out why lead poisoning–the longest pediatric epidemic in US history–is still ongoing, and why there is a mysterious lack of awareness and action on the issue. In OAKLEAD, Ben Tapscott, a retired basketball coach from the predominantly Black McClymonds High School, becomes a whistleblower when he discovers the school withheld knowledge of lead contamination in the school’s drinking water. Media attention pressures the school district to conduct further testing–and lead contamination is discovered at 40 other schools.

Xóchitl Cortez, founder of Frontline Catalysts, is on the frontlines of lead poisoning activism in Oakland. Xóchitl understands what is at stake, because her family has experienced severe illness due to environmental racism in Oakland. She now teaches Oakland middle schoolers about environmental justice, and how to test their backyards for lead. Unfortunately, many of the students, including Sheila, find out they have dangerously high levels of lead in their soil. Sheila rises to the occasion, using Xochitl’s community education to protect her family and stand up for her community. Suddenly, Adrian, our producer, finds out he has lead poisoning after unknowingly moving near a notorious foundry. We focus on Xóchitl, Sheila and Adrian’s stories, and situate them in the context of chilling archival evidence–from 1920s lead paint propaganda to present day congressional hearings. How can we protect ourselves from the environment that surrounds us? Can there ever be accountability, within the system that created this crisis?

Project Status

This August, news broke, again, of widespread lead contamination and withholding of test results by Oakland Unified School District. We are currently part of, and documenting, the new coalition’s actions as we work to end the crisis in our community. This spring, we began initial editing, and we expected one final week of pickups before we wrapped this fall. Now that the story has taken on new life, we have a production need of $100k to complete production.

Artist Statement

I began working on this film when I learned that my neighborhood, Fruitvale, is one of 3,000 communities in the United States experiencing lead poisoning at an even higher rate than Flint, Michigan. OAKLEAD centers the people most affected by the lead poisoning epidemic, both as the production team and as on-screen participants. My intended impact with OAKLEAD is for my crew, community and I to learn and document how our solidarity, in life and film production, can change our material realities and build healthy communities. Today, 7 years after I began this documentary, my community has initiated a new uprising. We are here to tell our stories, and we invite you to be part of resourcing our resistance; may it inform and inspire the Bay and beyond.

Director & Producer Bios

Director & Producer

Alex J. Bledsoe is a film director, producer and multidisciplinary artist whose work is focused on Black liberation, healing justice, and dismantling exploitative systems, especially related to medical and environmental racism. Her debut documentary, OAKLEAD, is a two-time Sundance Documentary Film Program grantee, a Berkeley Film Foundation grantee, the winner of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Elevate Award, a two-time Redford Center grantee, and a fellow in the Sundance Finance and Strategy Intensive. Alex produced the narrative feature, Residue, about gentrification in Washington, D.C., which streamed on Netflix after premiering at Venice International Film Festival. Alex was an inaugural YBCA 10 fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she created and debuted her installation, Reroot, Reroute, exploring Black diasporic homemaking. She is the co-founder of Breaktide Productions, an award-winning film production company owned and operated by women of color in the Bay Area. Alex earned her B.S. from Georgetown University with a degree in international politics, where she studied Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic.

Producer

Jalena Keane-Lee (she/her) is a filmmaker who explores intergenerational trauma and healing through an intersectional lens. She was named one of DOC NYC’s 2024 40 Under 40 Filmmakers to Watch, a 2023 Adobe x Sundance Woman to Watch, and co-founded Breaktide, an all-women-of-color video production company that has won two Cannes Lion awards for branded content. Jalena’s first feature-length documentary STANDING ABOVE THE CLOUDS premiered at HotDocs in 2024 where it won Best Social Impact Documentary.

Creative Producer

Adrian Burrell is a third-generation Oakland filmmaker who uses photography, film, and site-specific installation to examine issues of race, class, gender, and intergenerational dynamics. His most recent short film, “The Game God(S),” was featured in the New Yorker. Adrian won the 2019 SF Camerawork Juror’s Choice Award, and is a 2021 YBCA creative cohort fellow. He has lived and worked on four continents and has exhibited work in spaces as varied as Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, Photoville in New York City, Pop-Up Magazine and SFMOMA.  Adrian earned a BFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. As a Stanford University IDA Visiting Artist, Adrian created and taught an undergraduate course in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and African and African American Studies, called Still Waters Run Deep, Troubling The Archive with filmmaking and photography.