Live streamer Patti Beers was banned from Twitter even as she’s turning the filmmaking of resistance on its head

Streaming journalism pioneer Patti Beers. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

by Sam Slovick

The videos by live streamer Patti Beers vary in length from seconds to hours. Played back to back, however, they become one endless movie documenting political resistance in Los Angeles. She may be L.A.’s most independent filmmaker, and she’s part of a movement reinventing the political documentary in real time.

Beers started live streaming at City Hall in Los Angeles during Occupy L.A., which began in 2011. “I went 18 hours on May Day, 2012,” she says. She’s since streamed thousands of hours and seen her social media reach expand to what she says is “about 5 million people in a variety of accounts.” More than a job, it’s a personal mission.

“I felt like there was a perspective that wasn’t being shown,” says Beers, whose social media handle is PM Beers. Her subject is resistance, downtown Los Angeles her canvas. Her defining talent is relentlessness.

This trait is evident at a recent contentious meeting of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the weekly gathering that has become Beers’ second home. Steady in the tense room where members of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter regularly challenge the commissioners, Beers holds two Android cellphones in one hand as she pans between the officials and those making public comment. Wearing a T-shirt and well-worn jeans, her hair is loosely braided and faded pink bangs frame her face as she live streams the political theater. Local characters, including a man who sometimes dresses as Batman, lash out at the commissioners on the dais.

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Source: Los Angeles Times | Live streamer Patti Beers was banned from Twitter even as she’s turning the filmmaking of resistance on its head


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