Civic Defense Film Festival

Civic Defense Film Festival
Saturday, Jan. 26th
Noon to Midnight
Bartos Auditorium
20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA
Free

What happens when a community confronts something overwhelming–whether a Wal-Mart, Soviets, or a hurricane? How can communities respond to threats or situations that push them to the edge? The Civic Defense Film Festival, presented by MIT’s new Center for Future Civic Media, is a day of documentaries* dealing with communities under stress. Join us for a uniformly depressing marathon of civic catastrophe, and help us think about how communities might use information technology to resist and recover. Anyone who stays for all the films will be eligible for a prize. Admission, tissue, and popcorn free of charge.

12 pm

Videograms of a Revolution shows civic media in action, a documentary filmed by Romanian camcorderists as revolution breaks out in Bucharest and eventually consumes the entire country. Master director Harun Farocki starts with the first moments of the uprising,when state television cameras, recording soon-to-be-executed President Ceausescu’s last speech, are pointed at the sky rather than film him being heckled by protesters. The job of capturing the messy, disorganized, unscripted nature of popular revolution falls to the populace itself.

106m, 1992 Harun Farocki, Andrei Ujica, and many more

2 pm

Imagine a western colonial power so determined to occupy a foreign capital and root out IED-wielding Islamic rebels that they are willing to kill civilians and use torture. Such an improbable scenario is offered in The Battle of Algiers, a film so timeless that it was screened in the Pentagon in 2003, though shot in 1966. Based on the war between the French and Algerian independence fighters from 1954-1960, the story was based on the memoirs of an FLN military commander, and the director borrowed ideas from anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon. Poignant and predictive, a must-see.

121m, 1967 Gillo Pontecorvo

4 pm

The devastation of a major American city, due to inclement weatherand murderous mismanagement, is the subject of Spike Lee’s After the Levees Broke. A sprawling, conversational series of interviews interspersed with documentary footage, Lee’s editing reflects the confusion and indeterminacy of the event itself. A 30-minute excerpt of the film will be shown.

2006 Spike Lee

(30-minute break)

5 pm

Harlan County powers your laptop. A coal-rich mining center in West Virginia, this region saw the high mortality rates, economic and environmental degradation, and misery typical where extractive industries harvest the resources that power the things we use everyday. Eventually the workers in the county form a union, and argue for higher wages, lighter phlegm, and mines that don’t collapse as often. At this point the extractive industries engage in “labor negotiations” by brutally beating and killing the miners.

103m, 1977 Barbara Kopple

(2 hour break)

9 pm

Red Dawn is a documentary** about the Soviet invasion of the United States, and the ensuing spirited and patriotic resistance byAmerica’s football players. Learn from the quarterbacks, linebackers, and tight ends who resist the demonic forces of Cubanatheism: On the run from the Ruskies, you can’t slow yourself down by lugging around a large vocabulary or unnecessary subtlety of thought. Based on a true story***, Red Dawn is the best cinematic argument ever made for the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment.

114m, 1984 John Milius

11 pm

Darwin’s Nightmare is a surprising, complicated portrayal of the area around Africa’s Lake Victoria following the introduction of a non-native fish by a well-meaning developmental technologist. The innocent perch start a fantastical domino effect of massive proportions, interpellating prostitutes, Russian pilots, arms smugglers, maggots, missionaries, nine-year-old huffers, and 20 million pleasantly sated Europeans. One of the most complex environmental films ever made, it also received an Oscar for best documentary.

107m, 2005 Hubert Sauper

*While the events portrayed in Red Dawn are not actually documentary, they may well have happened. They could still happen. At any moment.

**Okay, it’s still not really a documentary, but you should still be very, very afraid.

***See * and **. A truthy story.