5/10/2022
Machetero (2008)
98 min | US | English
Director: Vagabond Beaumont
Machetero is an allegorical narrative that follows French journalist Jean Dumont to a New York prison, where he interviews Pedro Taino, a so-called “Puerto Rican Terrorist.” Pedro is a self-described Machetero fighting to free Puerto Rico from the yoke of United States colonialism.
Post-9/11 definitions, ideas and notions of terrorism are challenged in this highly controversial and experimental film. Machetero is about how terrorism and terrorists are defined and by whom. It asks us to question the way in which we view the events that play out in the world and questions the cyclical nature of violence perpetuated by those who choose to oppress and those who no longer wish to be oppressed.
Trailer
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12/10/2022
Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016)
61 min | Palestine, France, Qatar | English and Arabic with Arabic subtitles
Director: Mohanad Yaqubi
Filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi draws on recently discovered and archival found footage to explore the tumultuous history of Palestine and Palestinian filmmaking in this documentary. This film is a unique historical portrait of the Palestinian people’s struggle to produce their own image. Using material long hidden in archives across the globe, the film reaches back through the modern history of Palestine and reverses decades of colonial dominance with a mosaic of struggle from the perspective of the colonised.
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19/10/2022
Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved our Collective Bodies (2013)
62 min | Serbia, France | Serbian and English with English subtitles
Director: Marta Popivoda
A research-based essay film as well as a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end and its recent transformation into several democratic nation states.
The film deals with the question of how ideology is performed in public spaces through collecting and analysing film and video footage from the Yugoslavian period, focussing on state performances (1945–2000) and counter-demonstrations (1968(.
Going through the images, the film traces how communist ideology was gradually exhausted through changing relations between the people and the state.
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26/10/2022
Twenty Years Later (1984)
119 min | Brazil | Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Eduardo Coutinho
This film was originally planned in 1964 as a feature film about the life and death of João Pedro Teixeira, a leader of the peasant leagues from Paraíba who was assassinated on the order of local landowners in 1962. But before the film could be completed, production was interrupted by political developments, with some of the crew and cast arrested and their materials confiscated by the Brazilian military dictatorship. In 1984, Coutinho returned to the material, shooting new footage of some of the actors and crew. The resulting critically acclaimed documentary gained a cult following. The Brazilian Film Critics Association selected it as one of the best Brazilian films of all time.