In his previous film, The United States of America (2022), James BENNING invited the audience to a journey through the United States without leaving one state. This time he takes the viewers to a single geographic space: Allensworth is California's first city founded, funded, and governed by Black Americans in 1908. As his fans might be aware, BENNING breaks away from the conventional grammar of documentaries and takes time, effort, and patience to show the landscapes and sounds. He makes us stare at a place that has long been forgotten and hidden by the traces of history due to excessive information and images. ALLENSWORTH treats time as a device to imprint what we see, and poetry and music, survivors of the test of time, handed down from generation to generation. As Borges famously put it, BENNING’s filmography seems to be a list of films sculpturing the face of America—or at least the face America once had. (Sung MOON)