CALLING ALL LEFTISTS! The past few years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating, and ripe with potential. It’s tremendously difficult, when in the thick of it, to pause, reflect, or even find a moment to catch a breath. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a global scale, with any number of future cataclysms hovering just over the horizon. But we digress.
Join us, then, for a series that asks: if not now, when? Come for great works of radical political filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to gossip and gripe. The hope isthat this forum for authentic representations of successes, defeats, and the messy work of political action, will be thrilling, edifying, and maybe even inspire your next organizing project. To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a moderately applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
A screening of short works by NYC-based anarchist video artists Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen. Stick around for a post-screening Q&A with the filmmakers.
Shot in Paris, Athens, Thessaloniki, Barcelona, and at an anti-fascist festival in Serbia, the video essay ROCK THE CRADLE centers on the fierce aftermath of the December ’08-January ’09 insurrection in Greece, during which an unprecedented array of the excluded and the intransigent took to the streets: the fed-up, the legions of radically disillusioned youth, the unemployed and the under-employed (the precariat), autonomous unions, angry refugees, anarchists and anti-authoritarians. The video reaches a startling climax when dozens of police attack Micropolis, an anarchist social center in Thessaloniki.
HOW DO ANIMALS AND PLANTS LIVE? is a radical inquiry into the sudden eviction and demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio (an abandoned orphanage) in Thessaloniki, Greece, in July 2016—under the direct orders of the Syriza government in cahoots with the Orthodox Church, the biggest landowner in Greece.
On-site testimony of a young West African migrant, first-hand exploration of revealing remnants of the bulldozed ruins of the orphanage, and performative translations from a Greek-language children’s schoolbook that the filmmakers found amid the rubble when they broke into the padlocked site pointedly coalesce to ask and answer : how is this possible?
If indeed “no one is illegal,” then this video salvages from the ruins the structure of a new commons–on the basis of such anarchist principles as self-organization, autonomy, solidarity, assembly, and direct action, at an historical moment when the status of the refugee has become a global paradigm.
Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen co-created the interventionist video project State of Emergency, collaborating with more than 15 artists in a silent shout-out against U.S. invasions of the Middle East and the global plague of neo-liberal ideology. Together they have also produced several situationist films, including PARTIAL CRITIQUE OF SEPARATION, two anti-documentaries redefining crime, and a series of semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the authoritarian structures indispensable to capital. Millner is also an installation artist and photomonteur; Larsen a novelist and media critic; his latest nonfiction novel is The Trial Before the Trial (Autonomedia). They have co-curated many programs of short-form radical experimental media at such venues as the Oberhausen Film Festival, the Subversive Film Festival, and the Flaherty New York series. They are co-producers of Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, more than forty films in two volumes, available (in DVD) from Facets.