Keelan and Griff Williams’s Tell Them We Were Here depicts San Francisco as a city with a rich history of social justice, strong sense of community, and creative people making art for the sake of making art. 

San Francisco in the 1960s was a hot spot of counterculture and social movements. In this time, the city took part in activism for prison reform, women’s liberation, Black rights, and more. These social campaigns bred a generation of free thinkers, innovators, and misfits who took to creating art as a way to understand their world and themselves better. 

In this documentary, we follow seven characters from the Bay Area who make unique art inspired by social change from the past. They create not for recognition, or worse, profit, but instead to serve the communities they live in. 

The film emphasizes that art has a bigger significance than monetary value, and that creating an experience and capturing a moment in time, feeling, or experience is infinitely more important than earning money from displaying your art. Speaking volumes about this, one artist in the film, after appearing in a museum, refuses to cash her honorarium cheque.  

As René de Guzman, senior curator of the Oakland Museum of California, says in the Tell Them We Were Here, “Art was not designed to be sold.” 

With each character, the audience learns a new lesson about what it means to be a creative person today, and what place art has inspiring activism and community. In one example, we see artist Sadie Barnette, take her father's old Black Panther FBI files and turn them into an art installation.  By covering the documents in glitter, spray paint, and stamps, she was able to reclaim her father’s history and illustrate who he was as a human being. That’s the sort of power that art in San Francisco inspires.