A MAGNUM OPUS FILMS COLLABORATIVE PROJECT
Project Description: Where I Got My Name
Over 20 years ago, I began researching where I got my name. Then, in June of 2023, my sons, Jamana and Jesse, and I made a life-changing journey to Mississippi and Louisiana to find out about our ancestors. We traveled to the sites of the plantations on which our family members were enslaved. There we began making a documentary film about our experience—but we need your help to finish the project. The YouTube video below is a 13-minute documentary on our Lenoir family's history that we made before we embarked on our journey. We are currently making a full length documentary on our family history. While this story is of immeasurable significance to our family, it is also vital for everyone to learn how the history of slavery shapes our society today.
Through our small family-owned company, Magnum Opus Films, we launched the project to tell the story of our people who were enslaved on the Lenoir plantation in Morgantown, Marion County, Mississippi and the Darensbourg plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. So far, we have gone south four times to research, document and film the story of our family’s journey from enslavement to emancipation.
We launched this project on Juneteenth 2022, a national celebration of Black emancipation! In 2026, Part I: "Where I Got My Name (Down in Mississippi) will be released. Part II: "Where I Got My Name (Down in Louisiana) will be completed in 2027. Together, they are the story of our family and millions of other African American families.
We are asking you to support this project in any amount that you can. Greatly Appreciated!
Gerald Darensbourg LeNoir, Jr.
Left to right: Jesse, Jamana, Gerald on the Lenoir Plantation at a gravesite for enslaved people
Won Best Short Film
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
2nd Annual Radical Imagining
First Annual Ten-Minute Film Festival
He began by asking us what we were doing and where we were from. “I have traveled from California with my sons to show them the land where our kin were enslaved,” my dad boldly replied. To our surprise, the landowner was moved my dad’s story and invited us to come to the other side of the fence and back to a clearing that he told us was the location of a cemetery where our ancestors were buried. When we reached the gravesite, we saw that only one weathered headstone—which was missing the portion with the name—remained.
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Jesse Hagopian
Jesse Hagopian is a high school teacher in Seattle,
an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, and the author
of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education
(Haymarket, 2025). "203"
Where I Got My Name | Preliminary Cut (2022)
The Magnum Opus Films Team
Synergy + Creativity + Synchronicity
The Blue Tide is the acoustic blues collaboration of lifelong friends J.D. Lenoir (Jesse Hagopian) and Daniel Rapport. Their sound is rooted in the classic delta blues tradition while their lyrics and attitude are firmly in the present.
