PROJECT OVERVIEW

OUR WICKED CITY is a character-driven film set in Phenix City, Alabama, a town at a cultural and economic crossroads. The film contrasts the town’s contemporary ambition to rebrand itself as “Positively Phenix City,” with the sordid reputation still lingering from its past as the once “Wickedest City in America.” The film focuses on collective memory and explores how this community remembers and reinvestigates its past.

The film is also complimented by multimedia visual art works including: altered found photographs, site-specific images, performance video works, and constructed re-enactments.



FILM SYNOPSIS

In the late nineteenth century, after Alabama lost access to utilizing the Chattahoochee River to power its mills, Phenix City leaders allowed organized crime to flourish for economic survival, earning the town the moniker, “The Wickedest City in America.” By the mid‑twentieth century, residents pushed back against entrenched corruption, and in 1954 a brutal act of violence propelled the city into national headlines.

Decades later, in 2016, the city elected its first Black mayor, Eddie Lowe, who has focused on community investment, youth opportunity, and the “Positively Phenix City” campaign, including a scholarship program for underserved students.

OUR WICKED CITY confronts the city’s fraught legacy by pairing Phenix City’s contemporary youth with archival materials, oral histories, and creative reenactments. Through these performances, young Phenix Citizens reclaim and reinterpret stories and myths long overshadowed, distorted, or forgotten. The film closes with Phenix City in transition, as a new generation reshapes its future and redefines a once tarnished legacy.



SUPPORT

The film is fiscally sponsored by the Southern Documentary fund. Tax-deductible donations to the film can be made via the Southern Documentary Fund.



FILMMAKERS

Directed by Adam Forrester and Laura Asherman
Produced by Artemis Fannin
Cinematography by Adam Forrester and Kristian Melom
Edited by Jeff Jay