Monthly Archives: January 2016

Political Education

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On January 15:th, the day Rosa Luxemburg was murdered 97 years ago, we went to the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin, “a nationwide political education organisation, a discussion forum for critical thought and political alternatives as well a research facility for progressive social analysis”. The Stiftung hosts an archive, a bookshop, lectures and presentations, and provides funding for external projects. They also present exhibitions.
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We had already educated ourselves a bit through watching the videowork The Capital of Accumulation, made by Raqs Media Collective, inspired by and borrowing the title from a work by Luxemburg that performs a critique of global political economy. Luxemburg’s book, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), can be found online at for example marxists.org. Whereas the videowork used to be downloadable from the website of Raqs, nowadays it can be found on Vimeo.
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At the Stiftung, we saw the exhibition Back to Rojava, with photographic posters of everyday life in West-Kurdistan, in northern Syria.
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Where can a person educate oneself about the situation in Syria? The media collective Abounaddara deals in what they call emergency cinema. Self-taught filmmakers who favor individual and personal stories and testimonies, while the larger view is created through an accumulation of these stories. Each week they post short films on their Vimeo channel. At the moment there are 382 films. You may have heard of them through the biennale in Venice last year.
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One could also follow the independent news collective Raqqa is being slaughtered silently, who report from inside the city of Raqqa, the so-called capital of the caliphate of IS. These reporters are working under extremely hazardous conditions, and the news they bring are not easy to assimilate.
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Back to Rojava. The autonomous region of Rojava, West-Kurdistan, in the North of Syria, near the border to Turkey. Socialist and feminist Rojava controlled by the People’s Protection Units and Women’s Protection Units, practicing stateless democracy since 2011. Stateless democracy based on self-governance, gender equality, the right to self-defense, and a communal economy.
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On July 14th 2015, the Rojava Film Commune began educating a new generation of filmmakers, providing studies in film theory, photography, editing, etc. The Commune also works on generating a new audience for film. The press release reads: “The squares of our villages will become our culture and art centers. Our factories and our restaurants will become cinema halls.”
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City squares with outdoor cinemas? In 1960 the fire at the Amûdê cinema killed 300 small boys, while soldiers locked the doors to prevent them from escaping. Came a fear of gathering in dark halls. Filmmaker Önder Çakar writes in a Letter from Rojava: “Currently, there are almost no film theatres in the region. Almost nobody among the local people has ever watched a film on the big screen. Whenever I asked in the meetings if there was anyone who had ever watched a film in a theatre, there were only one or two old gentlemen over fifty years old who raised their hands. They have seen a couple of karate films in big cities such as Aleppo or Damascus.”
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The Rojava Film Commune works around the concept of revolutionary realism, by which they mean a rejection of realism as showing only what is present at this moment, and rather a realism showing what is possible. The concept is described in depth in an article written by Jonas Staal for e-flux Magazine.
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To educate oneself about the ongoing processes in Rojava, one could keep an eye out for the forthcoming films springing from the Rojava Film Commune, news of which will be found on their website. Or one could accept the invitation given by the Commune, to documentarians and filmmakers who wish to visit Rojava and make a film of their own.
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We will return to the topic of Rojava Film Commune presently. Stay tuned.
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Happy New Five Year Plan (I)

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regeringen rubrik

“We are fuelled by a desire to bring down the government” – well, tick that box

2016 is not only the Year of the Monkey, it is also the fifth year of activities for the Sunshine Socialist Cinema. When we started out, way back when, we set up some goals for ourselves that were quite modest, in hindsight. We called it our five year plan, on the basis that our primary goal was to simply exist for five years before giving up and shutting down. During these five years, we would screen art videos in our small village in the countryside, and power the screenings by solar panels. We also wanted to see what would happen if we openly proclaimed ourselves as socialist, in an area of Sweden traditionally dominated politically by the right. Who would we attract? What would we talk to them about?

The first revision of our goals came after only two screenings. We had sent out invitations to various leftwing and environmentalist organzations in the region. During those first screenings, members of the audience would come up to us afterwards and offer their opinions on the films that had been shown. That’s when we figured out that they should have said these things to each other, during the screening – the local left and the local greens could discuss these videos together. We had to figure out how to create an atmosphere that would allow for this to happen, to make it easy to speak out in front of each other. Such an obvious thing, but it still came to us through practice and not forethought.

We also wondered if artists would allow us to screen their videos in a cinema that labelled itself socialist – not to say that we would label their works in any way. The very first artist we got in touch with was Harun Farocki, asking him if we could screen his film Workers Leaving the Factory. He replied not only with a yes, but with a letter of support, of sorts, which meant a lot to us. Over the years, we have had positive replies from all but two or three artists.

We hadn’t counted on reaching people outside of our local area, other than through what we wrote on our blog and in our emails. But gradually we got more and more invites from various art institutions, asking us to come and do screenings with them. So we had to figure out not only how to set it up technically, but also how to make it meaningful for us as a cinema. Over the years, we’ve done screenings outside art museums and independent art spaces, biennales and film festivals. The fees we got from this was used to finance the screenings and the equipment at our main site in the village.

More goals and more purpose has been added along the way. One is that we want to mean something to the village we’re in, irrespective of the political bent of the people there. When we first came to this village, there was a small library in its’ centre. The library has since been shut down due to municipal budget cuts. We decided to add a small reference library to our cinema, with books that could be borrowed home by people who live in the village. The books are paid for by the fees generated by outside screenings, and by the money we make from a study group at the local Workers Educational Association (ABF).

Another goal added is that we want to try to spread the format of our cinema, to share what we’ve learned and the experiences we’ve made, with people who might be interested in trying something similar. We don’t want to be a monopoly operation. In 2015 we printed a 40-page manual, which we hand out for free at screenings, and which is made available at various libraries. You can also find it here on the blog, as a PDF.

The Year of the Monkey is not the end of us though. This is not a goodbye speech. Our first goal wasn’t to exist for five years, but for AT LEAST five years. It’s time for us to come up with a new five year plan. It seems appropriate for us to be less modest in our ambitions this time.

There will be a screening in our village this summer, tied to a jubilee celebration.

Then there will be more.