American Masters
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
Marlee Matlin, the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award, looks back on her remarkable life, career, and the complexities of being the “first.”
State of Oregon
With divisive U.S. politics surging, the 2016 murder of a Black teenager in Portland drives a personal investigation revealing Oregon’s founding as a “whites-only” state.
- Funding Initiative
- Diversity Development Fund
Director/ Producer
Adele Pham
Adele Free Pham is an activist and filmmaker. Her feature documentary, Nailed It, broadcast on PBS in 2019. Her next feature, State of Oregon, investigates the 2016 murder of Larnell Bruce Jr. by a white supremacist, linking to Oregon's founding as a white homeland state. She directed a short by the same name, produced by Field Of Vision.
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The Film
When the murder of Black teenager Larnell Bruce Jr. by a white supremacist overlaps with the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, filmmaker Adele Free Pham returns to her hometown of Portland, Oregon to investigate. As the child of a Vietnamese refugee father and white American mother, Adele often felt that no one cared when people of color were harmed, and the cold facts of Larnell’s murder draw her deep into the legacy of Oregon’s racially exclusionary past.
Free Pham delves into the state’s exclusion laws, which constitutionally banned Black and non-white people from citizenship when Oregon entered the Union in 1859. The state’s white supremacist history is a microcosm of a larger national story that leads Free Pham to explore the racial tension that has plagued the U.S. since its inception. Weaving Larnell’s execution, the trial of his murderers, and the verdict through the State of Oregon illustrates the ways in which racially motivated attacks spawn from a legacy of oppression.
