In the Southern Illinois region of Little Egypt, a sound recordist walks through the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts – the housing projects that once formed the heart of the Black community of his hometown of Cairo. His mic picks up sounds: children play, sparrows flock, and a grandmother sages her granddaughter, as a 1970 private release LP by the United Front of Cairo featuring its founder Reverend Dr. Charles Koen guides the sound recordist on his search.

On the Battlefield follows a Black sound collector as he navigates a field in Illinois, once home to a housing development known as "Little Egypt." This site, sharing its name with the protagonist's hometown, was a significant African American community in the 1960s and a birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. As the sound collector moves through the landscape, his boom microphone captures echoes from the grass, trees, and sky, unearthing auditory remnants of past struggles from the now-vacant lots. These sonic imprints trace a path back to the Civil Rights Movement, creating a temporal network that connects liberation struggles across time and space. Led by J.P. Sniadecki, On the Battlefield is a collaborative effort by the Little Egypt Collective. The film summons sonic ghosts to evoke a dark history, providing a unique space for encounter, resistance, and inspiration. By interweaving sound, memory, and history, the film offers a powerful meditation on the enduring echoes of social justice movements and the landscapes that bear witness to them.

Little Egypt Collective (LEC) is a multi-racial, multi-generational group of artists from “Little Egypt” in Southern Illinois and Chicago. They approach filmmaking as a mode of collective world-building and a means of investigating social conditions of inequality in Southern Illinois, a region historically marked by economic and racial injustices.

Arsenal Films

ara@arsenal-berlin.de​