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15-18 Nov: Anarchistisch Filmfestival Amsterdam

Datum:
18-11-2019
-
Aanvang:
08:00

The program of the Anarchist Film Festival is out! The full program with all the film titles is published here on our newsletter. Find the list of films and screening times below.

Please join us for our three day Anarchist Film festival, with a special 6 hour screening on Monday, featuring a broad spectrum of anarchist film, ranging from deceptively childlike animations to in-your-face soft porn, from candid documentaries to surrealist explorations of human nature.
Alongside the movies on Fri/Sat/Sun we will have vegan food and baked goods and merch stands for groups like Abortion Network Amsterdam, the Spanish CNT and the Zapatistas National Liberation Army!

Don’t miss out!

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FULL PROGRAM –

FRIDAY 15th November

16:00 – Voices of Bakur + Distant

Voices of Bakur
Two Rivers and a Valley / 2015 / Turkish, Kurdish, EU + USA / 32 min
English subtitles.

A highly important documentation of an under-reported popular insurrection for autonomy covering democratic autonomy, women’s liberation, self-defense and the civil war in southeastern Turkey. The film features interviews shot on the ground with various Kurdish organizers, many of whom are now facing jail sentences, are already in jail or were killed. It also features footage from various news sources which have now been shut down and banned by the state. The film was created by Two Rivers and a Valley, a collective of Turkish, Kurdish, European, and US radical filmmakers.

Distant
Leyla Toprak / 2016 / Syria + Turkey / 16 min
English subtitles.

The Syrian Kurdish militia defending Kobane against the Isis terrorists are one third women. In this short film about war and the love of life, two female fighters describe why this struggle is also one for women’s freedom. Their optimism is contrasted with the ruins of the city. Through short, precisely composed shots the camera explores the possibilities of new life among ruins through which a mysterious dancer is moving.

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17:30 – To Wait or Provoke + Crowbar

To Wait or Provoke
Matthieu Quillet / 2018 / France / 17 min
English spoken.

A filmed letter from the text “Crowbar chronicles, fragments of a life from breaking and entering. A subversive, offensive but also self-critical testimony of 15 years (and more) squatting life experience.

Crowbar
Matthieu Quillet / 2016 / France / 80 min
French spoken. English subtitles.

This documentary on the everyday life and struggles of squatted social spaces was made between 2014 and 2018 featuring squats, a self-managed space, a neighbourhood, occupied land and their hundred inhabitants in a medium sized city in France, following their meetings, parties and how they manage their space.

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20:30 – Lasting Marks + Raspberry Reich.

Lasting Marks
Charlie Lyne / 2018 / UK / 15 min
English spoken.

The story of a group of men with shared sexual desires, lucky to have found each other yet unfortunate to be considered criminal for expressing them and the vice investigation (named ‘Operation Spanner’) that followed when the police acquired a video tape of these acts being performed. At once heart-breaking and heart-warming, this short documentary tells the story of sixteen men prosecuted for sadomasochism in Thatcher’s Britain.
Presented in vertical format, a presentation Lyne put a lot of thought and research into, the film is created entirely out of photocopied documents (newspaper clippings and trial transcripts) with a friendly voice-over sharing a perspective that was suppressed at the time – that of a participant in the infamous orgy.

Raspberry Reich
Bruce LaBruce / 2004 / Germany + Canada / 90 min
English spoken.

As hilerious as it is hot, the film showcases what LaBruce calls “terrorist chic”, cult dynamics, and the “innate radical potential of homosexual expression”. The story follows a contemporary terrorist group consisting of several young men, and a female leader named Gudrun (after Gudrun Ensslin) who are continuing the work of the Red Army Faction. They call themselves the “Sixth Generation of the Baader-Meinhof Gang” and “The Raspberry Reich”. – “Reich” is a reference to communist sexologist Wilhelm Reich, and the term “Raspberry Reich” was coined by RAF leader Gudrun Ensslin to refer to the oppression of consumer society.

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MUSIC – MC MUSTAJ

A queer electronic musician and rapper based in Amsterdam, bringing sexy beats, hardcore bass, souly vocals and tight rhymes filled with hope, using music to share, to connect, to dance, to release and as a weapon against the structures of oppression, in particular those of gender and racism, this society is based on.

PARTY – until 1:00

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SATURDAY 16th November

12:00
Boy and The World
Alê Abreu / 2013 / Brazil / 80 min
No dialogue.

A deceptively simple yet emotionally complex Brazilian animation that truly exemplifies the power of imagery and music in combination as more than enough to portray a powerful and deep message. It shows an adventurous quest of a heartbroken young boy searching for his father, illustrating the issues of the modern world through the eyes of a child. A cautionary tale of globalization, The Boy And The World teaches above all the dangers of the massification of the economy, of the mind, and of the soul.

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14:00
The Fig House
Pitzi Kampouroglou / 2019 / Greece / 107 min
Greek spoken. English subtitles.

Ten persons of different nationalities, refugees and activists (plus a cat), are living for seven months in a squat in Thessaloniki while trying to reach Germany through the Balkan route. While working to achieve their goal, they come across the everyday troubles and risks familiar to those who live on the edge of society.

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17:00
Hamburger Gitter
Steffen Maurer + Marco Heinig / 2018 / Germany / 80 min
German spoken. English subtitles.

The state lost control of Hamburg in the summer of 2017 during the G20 protests and is now trying to regain it. 170 investigators are working on hundreds of cases against militant demonstrators and people involved in rioting and looting. Harsh punishments were demanded and imposed in more than 40 cases so far. This documentary focuses on how the protests were dealt with and state security policy, paying attention to why freedom of assembly, freedom of movement and freedom of the press are important when considering the changes in police strategies. Could fundamental rights be suspended during protests? Are there judicial and legislative grounds to react differently to violent protests? Which methods of repression of the “exceptional G20 situation” in Hamburg could become the norm? Hamburger Glitter follows up by documenting the relevant events, talking to people on both sides and interviewing experts on the history of protests, fundamental rights, security policy and the overall political situation.

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19:30
Concerning Violence
Göran Olsson / 2014 / Sweden, Finland, Denmark + USA / 90 min
English spoken.

Reporting the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule, this documentary based on Frantz Fanon’s essay, Concerning Violence, from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, narrates the events of African nationalist and independence movements in the 1960s and 70s which challenged colonial and white minority rule. Fanon’s landmark book, written over 50 years ago, is still a major tool for understanding and illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the violence and reactions against it.

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21:30
The Exterminating Angel
Luis Buñuel / 1962 / Mexico / 93 min
Spanish spoken. English subtitles.

Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is both a macabre comedy and bitter view of human nature that suggests we harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets, and a scathing satire of the ruling class in Franco’s Spain, who having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, sit down for a feast only to
find it never ends. Trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac and increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed. Take a group of prosperous dinner guests and pen them up long enough, Bunuel suggests, and they’ll turn on one another like rats in an overpopulation study.

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MUSIC – OUST

Generic pissed off raw punk destruction from Amsterdam and Nijmegen.
https://oustpunx.bandcamp.com/releases

PARTY – until 1:00

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SUNDAY 17th November

12:00 – Homotopia + Born in Flames

Homotopia
Eric Stanley / 2007 / USA / 27 min
English spoken.

Set sometime in the future-present, Homotopia chronicles a group of radical queers dedicated to exposing the trouble with gay marriage, dismantling the State, undoing Empire, while looking totally fierce. Woven into the story of Yoshi’s adventures in love, resistance, and sex, is a critique of the crushing violence of homonormativity and its deadly perpetuation of US patriotism, conservative kinship structures and affective accumulation. Homotopia holds cinematic assumptions hostage through its motley assemblage of never-passing crew. Race, gender, ability and desire are reworked through an anti-colonial take of queer struggle creating a visual rhythm of melancholic utopianism that knows there may be no future but still hopes today is not their last.
Love revolution, not State delusion, Homotopia.

Born in Flames
Lizzie Borden / 1983 / USA / 90 min
English spoken.

Inspiring a generation of feminists, this science fiction is set ten years after the most peaceful revolution in United States history, a revolution in which a socialist government gains power, this films presents a dystopia in which the issues of many progressive groups – minorities, liberals, gay rights organizations, feminists – are supposedly dealt with by the government, and yet there are still problems with jobs, with gender issues, with governmental preference and violence. In New York City, in this future time, a group of women decided to organize and mobilize, to take the revolution farther than any man – and many women – ever imagined in their lifetimes.

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14:30
If A Tree Falls
Marshall Curry / 2011 / USA + UK / 85 min
English spoken.
The remarkable story of the rise and fall of an Earth Liberation Front cell, focusing on the transformation and radicalization of one of its members, Daniel McGowan, who was arrested in a nationwide sweep of radical environmentalists involved with ELF, a group the FBI has called America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.” For years the ELF launched spectacular arsons against dozens of businesses they accused of destroying the environment: timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a $12 million ski lodge at Vail, Colorado, while operating in separate anonymous cells without any central leadership. Part coming-of-age tale, part cops-and-robbers thriller, the film interweaves an honest chronicle of Daniel on house arrest as he faces life in prison, with a dramatic recounting of the events that led to his involvement with the group.
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16:30
Pom Poko
Isao Takahata (Studio Ghibli) / 1994 / Japan / 119 min
English dubbed.

A community of magical shape-shifting raccoon dogs struggle to prevent their forest home from being destroyed by urban development. The story begins in late 1960s Japan when a group of raccoons are threatened by a gigantic suburban development project on the outskirts of Tokyo which is cutting into their forest habitat and dividing their land. The story resumes in early 1990s Japan during the early years of the Heisei era, when the economy and consumerism is booming. With limited living space and food decreasing every year, the raccoons begin fighting among themselves for the diminishing resources, but at the urging of the matriarch Oroku (“Old Fireball”), they decide to unify to stop the development.

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19:30
Lifeboat
Skye Fitzgerald / 2018 / USA / 40 min
English spoken.

With the political climate increasingly hostile to immigrants and refugees, this documentary focuses on the civilian impact of the Syrian conflict by following the people desperate enough to risk their lives in rubber boats leaving Libya in the middle of the night, despite a high probability of drowning, and the volunteers of Sea Watch, a German non-profit with few resources, who fight multiple governments to save migrants from sinking rafts, certain that civil society must intervene.

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21:30
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Ana Lily Amirpour / 2014 / USA / 102 min
Persian spoken. English subtitles.

In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome skateboarding vampire  who preys on men who disrespect women. The first Iranian Vampire Western ever made, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genres, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.

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MONDAY 18th November

17:00
La Commune (Paris, 1871)
Peter Watkins / 2000 / France / 5 hrs 45 mins
French, English subtitles.

In this war drama blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, the working class and the bourgeoisie of 19th century Paris are interviewed and covered on television, before and during a tragic workers’ class revolt. A gripping historical re-enactment in the style of a documentary on The Paris Commune, “La Commune de Paris”, a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871.

The film will be shown in two parts with a 30 minute intermission.

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Tickets –
€3 – €5 suggested donation. First come, first serve.
All proceeds are going to the Anarchist Defence Fund.

Sign up for a Volunteer shift!
We will be needing a few extra hands during the festival- we might need help with the bar, stands, or a quick trip to the supermarket. Each volunteer will get two free movie tickets!

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F0D4DAEAB23A5FB6-anarchist