Connecticut’s Fault Lines

Connecticut’s Fault Lines explores the racial, economic, social, and health inequities brought into sharper view by the COVID-19 pandemic in Hartford, Connecticut.

Connecticut is often associated with wealth, educational opportunity, and leading institutions. Beneath that image are longstanding disparities that shape everyday life. The pandemic exposed and intensified conditions that had developed over generations.

Through first-person accounts, the film places the experiences of people living and working in Hartford within a broader history of race, health, migration, and neighborhood inequality. At its center are people: their observations, losses, work, resistance, and resilience during an extraordinary period.

The story behind the film

From community conversations to the screen.

The film grew from Christiana Best-Giacomini’s community engagement and volunteer work in Hartford, alongside conversations with guests on her podcast, Inside Out/Outside In. As COVID-19 arrived, those encounters raised questions about why its effects were so unequal, which historical conditions shaped those differences, and whose voices would be heard in the record of the pandemic.

Documentary storytelling offered a way to connect scholarship, history, and community knowledge beyond academic spaces. The resulting film encourages continued conversation about inequality, public health, community, and social change.

Explore Inside Out/Outside In

Voices from the community

A record shaped by lived experience.

Contributors include community members and organizers; healthcare, public health, and frontline workers; social workers; historians and educators; theologians; students; municipal leaders; and members of Hartford’s Black and West Indian communities.

Speaking from their experiences, professional roles, and areas of knowledge, they offer a multidimensional account of a global crisis and the social conditions surrounding it.

• Racial and economic inequality, health disparities, and access to care.
• Hartford’s history, neighborhood inequality, and Black and Caribbean experiences.
• Essential work, racism and discrimination, community response, and resilience.

Available for educational, professional, and community screenings, with opportunities for conversation with the filmmaker.

A screening can be paired with a facilitated discussion, panel, guest lecture, or educational program. Programs can be tailored for universities, social work programs, healthcare and public health organizations, libraries, cultural institutions, faith communities, and professional associations.

The documentary can support teaching across social work, public health, sociology, history, education, political science, ethics, healthcare, and community studies. Reflection and discussion questions can help audiences connect lived experience with structural inequality, professional practice, and social responsibility.

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Speaking & collaborations