Connectivity: Storming Caesars Palace

Directed by Hazel Gurland-Pooler, Storming Caesars Palace (2022) chronicles the life of Ruby Duncan (1932 – 2026) , who rose from hotel maid to prominent protester, movement organizer, and White House advisor while fighting to defend and expand welfare rights in Las Vegas. To combat unjust accusations of fraud made by the Nevada welfare department, Duncan organized a feminist civil rights movement led by low-income mothers demanding dignity, democratic participation, and a guaranteed basic income. Through interviews with Duncan, her family, and movement leaders including Gloria Steinem, the film weaves together extensive archival footage to spotlight an unsung struggle that challenged presidents, confronted the Las Vegas power structure, and forced Americans to rethink the racist and sexist myth of the “welfare queen.” Adapted from Annelise Orleck’s acclaimed book, Storming Caesars Palace offers a timely reminder of a fight for economic justice led by those most marginalized. Following the screening, filmmaker Hazel Gurland-Pooler joined moderator Chelsea Kai Roesch (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of Storming Caesars Palace and its enduring relevance today. Hazel Gurland-Pooler is a Colombian-born, New York City-based documentary filmmaker who uplifts the stories of women from underrepresented communities, fighting to overcome historical and present-day intersectional discrimination. Storming Caesars Palace, Hazel’s first feature-length documentary, premiered as the Opening Night film at the BlackStar Film Festival (2022) and won the coveted Shine Award. Since then, the film has screened at 75+ national and international festivals and community events, winning numerous Best Documentary Feature and Best Director awards. The film also received industry recognition by winning the 2023 IDA’s ABC News VideoSource Award for best use of archival material. While Hazel works on her new personal documentary, Finding Luz, she supports filmmakers through Impact Producing on projects such as For the Love of Strippers, about dancer unionization efforts, which is currently on the festival circuit, and Story Producing for the four-part series Fall of Diddy, streaming on HBO Max. Previously, Hazel directed ten episodes of PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-produced the six-hour The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, also with Dr. Gates, which won Emmy, Peabody, duPont-Columbia, and NAACP Image awards. Hazel also produced Roots: A History Revealed, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary Television. Hazel has contributed to documentaries for CNN Originals, Investigation Discovery/MAX, HBO, PBS, FRONTLINE, AMC, ABC News, HISTORY, and A&E. Chelsea Kai Roesch is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at UCSB, where she studies digital media, internet culture, and tech labor. She is a University of California Regents Fellow and has received awards from the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) , the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Chelsea is the organizer of the Alt-Right Media Literacy Series—a speaker series aimed at understanding the new visual language of the Right online. Chelsea is currently conducting research on women workers in digital casinos. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue. The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.