DocX Diaries: Reflections From Arielle Knight

Director Arielle Knight is a New York- and Mexico-based documentary filmmaker and producer mining the absurd, mythological and mundane to center and recover the multiplicity of Black experiences. She participated in the DocX Residency: Another World is Possible at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in spring 2025 — conceived by Stephanie Owens and Nyssa Chow as an invitation for documentary artists to connect, breathe and create. 

Below, Knight reflects on this experience and time spent working on their project, “And Counting,” a hybrid documentary film that chronicles four years of family separation and explores the emotional toll of imprisonment while breaking open the imaginative possibilities for connection in the face of confinement. The film is a poetic meditation on the enduring bonds of Black family.

“I have experienced the alchemy of slowness.”

One of the reasons we came together in Durham was to explore a question: How do we consider otherwise histories? How do we create otherwise futures? I think that moving slowly may be one of the roadmaps to an answer. There is something inherently “otherwise” about carving out space and time for sumptuous community-making, even —and perhaps especially — in the shadow of the violent collapse of empire. 

As a cohort, we spent a lot of time together lamenting the state of the world and our place in it as artists and history-keepers. We also spent a lot of time experiencing and creating moments of joy and connection. Against the backdrop of all that is happening in our world, these moments felt… transgressive. During my time in Durham, I began to understand that “the work” is also encompassed by these moments: slowing down, being in community with others, dreaming and imagining what might have been and what could still be.

“I began to understand that “the work” is also encompassed by these moments: slowing down, being in community with others, dreaming and imagining what might have been and what could still be.”

I came to Duke with the intention of working on a documentary film titled “And Counting,” a film that loosely chronicles my family’s journey through four years of incarceration. My cousin Moradeyo was recently released from prison, and I asked him to join me for a few days in Durham to work on the film. Our time together was filled with many firsts for him and for us. It was the longest stretch of time we’ve spent together since he was released from prison last year. We drove to Wilmington to take a dip in the ocean, the first time for him in 10 years. We danced together with our bare feet in the grass, and we remembered versions of ourselves before the violence of prison and separation. Mostly we moved slowly, through water, through pollen, through large BBQ platters, through the heavy humidity of North Carolina spring edging towards summer. We did the work. 

“What is required of us as artists in and through our long undoing?”

Another one of the many gifts of my time here is that I finally finished reading Christina Sharpe’s “Ordinary Notes.” Though saying I’ve “finished” feels inaccurate, since it is a text that will likely live with me for the rest of my life. In it, she indexes moments of Black life through a series of interconnected reflections. In one such reflection, she asks, “What is required of us, now? In this long time of our undoing?” This question feels distinctly related to the questions we have been invited to consider during our time in residence with DocX. What is required of us as artists in and through our long undoing? As my time here in Durham begins to wind down, I feel a deep sense of certainty about what is required of me. I am what I need to be, where I need to be, doing my work.