Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief
Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief
Ten years after the Ferguson uprising, "Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief" returns to St. Louis to reckon with what remains. Told through poetry, music, and intimate reflections from residents, including three siblings of Michael Brown Jr., the 36-minute film explores the weight of collective grief and what it takes to move through it. Part remembrance, part meditation, "Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief" asks how a community can carry profound loss without being consumed by it, and how grief itself might be transformed into memory, connection, and something that resembles healing.
This project (raw cut) screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival as part of the Ten Years Project in 2024, in a private feedback screening at People’s Art and Recreation Center January 2026, and a community feedback screening August 2026.
Directed by Cami Thomas, DPd by Hezekiah Condron, score by Mvstermind and Owen Ragland, vocals by Bloom, and featuring the many spaces and faces of St. Louis, MO.
Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief is now complete, and has entered the film festival submission process.
Director’s Statement
In 2014, the country heard about Ferguson. To much of the world, it was a city on fire, a community shrouded in mystery and consumed by rage. But for me, it was home. And while the cameras eventually left, the grief stayed.
Ten years later, I was asked to make a film marking the anniversary of Michael Brown Jr.’s death and the uprising that followed. When we asked Michael Brown Sr. and Cal Brown what had been missed in all those years of coverage, they told us that people rarely asked Michael’s siblings what they experienced. So we did.
At the same time, an anniversary of my own grief was approaching. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the ways loss travels through us. Through Michael’s siblings, through my uncle speaking about losing his brother to police violence, through my grandfather remembering his experiencing Vietnam, and through my own body, still carrying what I had witnessed and lost.
"Ferdinand’s Guide to Grief" became an attempt to crack that grief open.
The title came to me while thinking about how the death of one person, like Archduke Franz Ferdinand, can ignite a war. Sometimes that war unfolds across nations. Sometimes across a city. And sometimes entirely within us.
This film is my gift to Michael Brown Jr., to his family, to my family, to my own grief, and to anyone carrying something they have not yet figured out how to move through. It does not ask us to enter our grief simply to sit there. It asks us to move through it, to crack open, and to let the light in. I hope this film finds you where, and how, it's meant to.
Thank you,
Cami Thomas