MAH Film Night: Radical Futurisms (Part II Rescreen)

Schedule

6:50pm – Screening opens. Space is limited to the first 100 people to sign into the Zoom meeting.
7:00pm – Welcome from MAH Staff, followed by an introduction from guest curator TJ Demos.
7:15pm – Film program will begin, followed by a 20 min open conversation on zoom.

The Zoom link will be sent out at 2pm & 6:40pm on event day to all that RSVP'd via Eventbrite. If you have any questions please email info@santacruzmah.org.

Featured Films

1. The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018 (26.29 min)
   Karrabing Film Collective (Aboriginal/Australia)
   
   In the not so distant future, Europeans will no longer be able to survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to survive, schooled in the centuries-old apocalypse of colonial domination. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to “save the white ‘race’,” is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape, he confronts two possible futures and pasts. The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, is a powerful intervention in contemporary debates about the future present of climate change, extractive capitalism, and industrial toxicity from the point of view of Indigenous worlds.
   
   
2. Dislocation Blues, 2017 (17 min)
   Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga/Luiseño)
   
   This film represents an incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock’s struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which began in 2016. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become. Destroyed in one of the first acts of the Trump presidency, the #NoDAPL camp of Indigenous land and water protectors and their environmentalist accomplices may nonetheless provide a glimpse of one possible emancipatory, decolonial future.
   
   
3. Comunicado del Comié Clandestino Revolutionario Indígena-Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, México, March of Silence, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Dec 21, 2012 (3.55 min),
   Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Indigenous Chiapas, Mexico)
   
   On the day that the Mayans predicted the end of one calendar cycle and the beginning of another, at least 50,000 Mayan Zapatistas came out of their autonomous zones to march in silence in five Chiapas cities: Ocosingo, Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas. In a collective act of discipline and choreography, not a word was spoken, only a written communiqué issued by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos at the end of the demonstration, which read: “Did you hear it? It is the sound of your world crumbling. It is the sound of our world resurging. The day that was day, was night. And night shall be the day that will be day. Democracy! Liberty! Justice! From the Mountains of Southeastern Mexico. For the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee — General Command of the EZLN. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Mexico, December 2012.”
   
   
4. Guardian of Corn, 2013 (3.25 min)
   Antonio Paucar (Peru)
   
   Guardian of Corn offers a short magical-realist imaging of revolutionary multispecies solidarity. An allegory of autonomous provisioning and subsistence farming, it resonates with Zapatista/Indigenous alliances with traditional maize, posed against NAFTA’s chemical-intensive and US-subsidized agro-economy.
   
   
5. The 6th World, 2013 (15:97 min)
   Nanobah Becker (Diné/Navajo)
   
   In the near future, a spaceship is headed to Mars crewed by Navajo astronaut Commander Tazbah Redhouse (Jeneda Benally), and scientist Dr. Smith (Luis Lopez Aldana). The night before her mission launches, Commander Redhouse has a disturbing premonition that proves fateful when the mission suffers a critical systems failure en route to the red planet. Ultimately, Redhouse must rely on her training as well as the traditional ecological knowledge of her people to ensure the survival of the mission. As such, the film offers one lesson for our collective future.