FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 7:30 PM
October rings in the next GET REEL with heavy church bells. GET Reel, the movie-based comedy show, returns with the theme “Unholy Communion.” Come pray away the un-Christian abomination of H*llowe’en. Comedians will live-dub over movies that fit the month’s theme, and hosts Joe and Max will ensure everyone has a very sacred evening.
D E E P PRESENTS: CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY
dir. Roger Hayn
2018, 77 mins
WORLD PREMIERE! *FILMMAKER IN PERSON*
(This event is $10.)
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10:00 PM
D E E P is a showcase of experimental films, web videos, and art pieces unearthed from the darker side of the internet, lovingly curated by filmmaker Chris Osborn. Founded in 2013 by Osborn during his time working as a Vimeo staff member, D E E P began as a channel that existed to showcase a burgeoning community of artists making groundbreaking work designed with the internet in mind. Now, with over 100,000 followers online, four years of IRL screenings and a monthly webseries in collaboration with Memory, D E E P is suiting up to premiere its first feature length film: Roger Hayn’s CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY.
Debby, already a proud mother of three, is overjoyed to learn that she is pregnant once again. Thrilled with the bright possibilities of the future, she is determined to share her good news with friends, family, and acquaintances. Yet despite the magnitude of her announcement, nobody in town seems to be quite as excited as Debby. To make matters worse, her children are too busy to even return her phone calls. The further Debby pushes to surprise her loved ones with the news, the faster her world hurtles in a direction she never imagined. A warped, uncanny melodrama which plunges into the depths of its protagonist’s interiors, CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY is both a shape-shifting mystery film as well as an exercise in formal distortion.
A conversation between Hayn and Osborn will follow both screenings.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. But is all looting progressive, are all copies an improvement on their originals? What if the future came to depend on the looting of the professional looters ‒ of the class that multiplies financial, legal, and cultural claims to capital ‒ by those with ever less to lose
Bookended by the London riots of 2011, DEAD THE ENDS is a dizzying, urgent retelling of the story at the heart of Chris Marker’s La Jetee.
Deploying dystopian sci fi, animated gifs, emojis and La Jetee ‘derivatives’ such as 12 Monkeys and The Edge of Tomorrow, it creates a nervous montage inspired as much by Ponzi fraudster Bernie Madoff’s forged trading receipts as Eisensteins’s notes for a film version of Marx’s Capital. Beginning in a future London ravaged by global war, the film time-travels back to the suspension of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971, and forward to the cop-infiltration of activist groups in the 1990s, ending with the urban insurrections that flamed the UK in August 2011. Recursive-convulsive, structure-busting-looping, Dead The Ends is militant cinema at its wildest.”
BENEDICT SEYMOUR is a filmmaker, writer, and musician. His published work includes video, fiction, and criticism, as well as several film soundtracks with artists such as Melanie Gilligan and Maija Timonen. His (mostly collaborative) music projects include Petit Mal, Antifamily, Traum and 트G. He is a long-term member of the editorial collective of Mute Magazine and Lecturer on the Fine Art MFA at Goldsmiths. He lives and works in London. His feature-length film, Dead the Ends, premiered in LUX’s Experimenta strand at the London Film Festival last year.
*FILMMAKER IN PERSON*
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM [Q&A w/Hillary Weston]
MONDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 7:30 PM [Q&A w/Andrew Lampert]
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM [Q&A w/Cristina Caccioppo]
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 5:00 PM
Caroline Golum’s rosé-refracted debut feature A FEAST OF MAN is a hilarious drawing-room comedy that pushes its audience to ask unspeakable questions of itself, performing a ruthless re-exhumation of THE BIG CHILL by way of Whit Stillman, Henry James and a pinch of Bette Gordon. Laurence Joseph Bond stars as Gallagher, a wealthy ne’er-do-well sitting on preciously guarded millions; when Gallagher dies in an untimely accident (kept mysteriously offscreen), his valet James (Zach Fleming) summons the late aristocrat’s closest friends (a murderer’s row of a cast including Frank Mosley, Marleigh Dunlap, Chris Shields and Katey Parker) to the family home in upstate New York, where he presents them with Gallagher’s final will and testament via videoconference. It’s revealed that the tony young codger will bequeath his fortune to the group, split evenly, but only if they agree, unanimously, to eat his corpse. A weekend of flashbacks, double-crosses and coastal-elite hand-wringing ensues: some characters retreat further into forced juvenilia while others, remembering all the slights and jealousies of their near/post-adolescent years, find an opportunity to avenge their lost youth. But throughout, the clock ticks with one question: will they go through with it?
A FEAST OF MAN is not like other movies: Golum’s screenplay (co-written by the prolific Dylan Pasture) is at once laden with one-liners and hijinks, yet keeps the audience guessing how blackened its heart really is, how low its comedy of rich people’s poor manners can, and will, go. While the leaves begin to wither and summer’s haze turns to polluted dust, Spectacle is thrilled to invite Golum, Pasture and their cast for a handful of special A FEAST OF MAN screenings with Q&As to follow.
CAROLINE GOLUM is a filmmaker, programmer, and critic living in New York. Her work has screened in venues from Birmingham, Alabama to Brisbane, Australia. As a writer she has contributed to Variety, Little White Lies, the now-defunct alt-weekly L Magazine, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She is a senior correspondent for Screen Slate and her weekly radio feature, “The Movie Minute,” can be heard every Friday morning on WFMU’s drive time morning show, “Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon.” Her next film, about 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, will begin production in 2019.
Cristina Cacioppo has been working as a programmer for almost twenty years, starting out at her campus cinema at University of Florida. Since then she has worked with Ocularis, Women in Film & Video/New England, 92YTribeca and for the past five years with the Alamo Drafthouse, now heading programming at their Downtown Brooklyn location. She is a devoted fan of the works of Agnès Varda and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Hillary Weston is a New York-based writer. She is the social media director for The Criterion Collection, as well as a staff writer for their online publication, and has written for Film Quarterly, BOMB, Interview, BlackBook, MUBI, Teen Vogue, and others.
Andrew Lampert is an artist who primarily works with moving images and performance, but he also teaches, writes and restores artist and independent films.
NOTE:
We are pulling this month’s screenings of a R**** P******* film, previously slated to pair with Caroline Golum’s A FEAST OF MAN. As a collective of programmers operating in a space constricted by budget and time, there was not a enough internal discussion about this film. We have received some considerate and fair criticism, particularly in light of the activity in the Supreme Court, which has moved us to suspend the three screenings. We appreciate the feedback.
ROCATERRANIA
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2009
USA. 74 min
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14th – 6:30 PM *BRETT INGRAM Q&A*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17TH – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 22ND – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 29TH – 7:30 PM
A documentary feature exploring the secret world of scientific illustrator and self-taught artist Renaldo Kuhler (American, 1931–2013). For thirty years, Kuhler created hundreds of plates for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, illustrating diverse flora and fauna for scientific journals, reference books, and exhibits. Unbeknownst to family, friends, and coworkers, Renaldo was also a prolific self-taught artist.
The son of Otto Kuhler, a renowned industrial designer, Renaldo was bullied and ridiculed by classmates, teachers, and headmasters simply for being different. When Otto moved the family from upstate New York to a remote cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies, teenaged Renaldo found the isolation unbearable. He escaped to the private fantasy world of his notebooks, inventing an imaginary country he called Rocaterrania. For the next 60 years, Renaldo illustrated the nation’s history, a coded, metaphoric account of his own life. Situated on the border of New York and Canada, populated mostly by European immigrants, Rocaterrania has a unique government, language, religion, railroad infrastructure, movie industry, prison system, and a fully mapped geography of cities, mountains, lakes, rivers, and farmlands. It also has a political history fraught with turmoil, one that mirrors Renaldo’s own struggle for independence and freedom.
Featuring an eclectic original score by Merge Records recording artists Shark Quest, Rocaterrania unveils Kuhler’s stunning creation, intricately dovetailed with the powerful story of his life. —brettingram.com
MONSTER ROAD
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2004
USA. 80 min
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14TH – 9:00 PM *BRETT INGRAM Q&A*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18TH – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23RD – 10:00 PM
MONSTER ROAD is a documentary feature exploring the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary animator Bruce Bickford. Bickford’s collaborations with rock musician Frank Zappa in the 1970s established him as an international cult artist. Decades later, the reclusive animator works alone in a basement studio near Seattle, producing films for no apparent audience. Enchanted forests, maniacal torture chambers, hamburgers that morph into mythical monsters, and epic battles between giants, fairies, and anachronistic historical figures populate just a small corner of Bickford’s animated universe.
Bruce is the sole caretaker of his father George, a retired aerospace engineer of the Cold War era who faces the tragic onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Struggling to pierce the fog of his painful memories, George considers the suffering of a life spent disengaged from his family and centered on the imperfections in those around him. His wondrous musings on the mysteries of the universe reflect a deep admiration for the implicit architect of such splendor while atheism prevents him from admitting the possibility of a God.
While the Bickfords lived a normal suburban life by all outward appearances, the brutality of Bruce’s obsessive childhood drawings and subsequent animations hints at a darker underbelly. Questions are raised for which there are no easy answers. MONSTER ROAD untangles myriad personal, artistic, and philosophical strands from the Bickfords’ lives to reveal an intricate web of motivations and influences fueling Bruce’s cinematic visions. —brettingram.com
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 4:00 PM *Q&A WITH BRETT INGRAM*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21ST – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24TH – 10:00 PM
SHORTS PROGRAM:
SPENT is a dark stop-motion tableau about chaos, control, and destiny featuring an unlikely cast of puppets. Set to a mantra-like score resembling a self-help tape from hell, trapped demons and prisoners of monotony populate a craggy subterranean purgatory, each driven to its own course of destiny by an apocalyptic cyclist. —brettingram.com
“Imagine your body telling your brain it doesn’t want it in there anymore,” says Reade Whinnem, “and then doing everything it can to try and make it leave.” Whinnem suffers from Panic Anxiety Disorder, and in Panic Attack, we are taken full-throttle into Whinnem’s living nightmare. Juxtaposing stark monochromatic interviews with colorful home movies, stop-motion animation, and hyperkinetic time lapse cinematography, this short film illustrates with expressionistic force the physical and emotional roller-coaster ride Whinnem calls daily life, affirming the courage and determination it takes to survive battles no one else can witness. —brettingram.com
What do an organ grinder monkey, camera-headed robot, and two numbed out teenagers have in common? The symbiotic processes of the idiot box, as it turns out. Freak Box is a stop-motion satire of the lulling effects of television, an insidious electromechanical circus where viewers project – and find – themselves in the deceivingly homogenous pixel array. —brettingram.com
Moon Plow is an abstract experiment in line animation, loosely inspired by Native American creation myths with a dark, contemporary twist. —brettingram.com
Short film pieces originally designed to run as loops as part of a large multimedia installation in a gallery environment, repurposed and combined for the Spectacle’s screen.
Ear-splitting improvisational noise sculpture and Christianity are rarely mentioned in the same breath, but for percussionist Scotty Irving these twin passions form the core of his one-man act, Clang Quartet. Inspired by biblical verse and utilizing homemade instruments, costumes, and found objects, Irving serves up dramatic aural and visual symbolism at unfathomable volumes, challenging his audience to rethink traditional ideas of music and spirituality. When Irving’s motivations for walking so far out on musical and theological limbs are revealed, “the armor of God” becomes a metaphor for the courage to create and the power to silence one’s inner critic. —brettingram.com
Luck of a Foghorn is a documentary featurette about Seattle underground animator Bruce Bickford, former collaborator of musician Frank Zappa and creator of Prometheus’ Garden, one of the most original stop-motion films in animation history. Interweaving Bickford’s pulsing, violent, magical, and mesmerizing clay animation with atmospheric 16mm and Super 8mm cinematography, home movies, and sparse interviews, Luck of a Foghorn takes viewers behind the scenes and deep into the garden of Prometheus. —brettingram.com
The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival invites you to an evening of mind altering shorts featuring the best
of sci-fi horror,and psychedelia.
Franklin Messer, a clinical hypnotist, struggles with a life-changing event and it’s future ramifications. Inspired by H.G. Well’s “Things To Come”
A girl encounters a glowing object.
‘Chateau Sauvignon: terroir’ follows the isolated adolescent son of a storied Vintnern family who finds himself torn between obeying his fathers callous restrictions and preventing his ailing mother from deteriorating further. When a doting woman and her indifferent son arrive seeking a tasting and tour of the winery, Nicolas sees an opportunity to help care for his mother, is well as prove his worth to his choleric father. However, his wayward plan quickly takes a turn for the worse, and his missteps puts his familys secretive murderous ways in peril of being unearthed.
This is a journey into the underground. Inspired by Dante’s 7 circles of hell- the video takes us on a journey to the darkest reaches of the human soul.
Inspired by the bizarre actual life events of Dutch librarian and medical student, Hugo Bart Huges, BRAINBLOODVOLUME is a stylistic interpretation of the essential moments at which Huges followed through with an operation he theorized would lead to a permanent state of higher consciousness through the ancient mind altering practice of trepanation.
To impress the girl across the hallway, the Pianist severs his own finger. However, things are not always as they first appear as he tries to run from the events of his past.
Inspired by a short story by William S Burroughs, author of “The Naked Lunch”.
A group of alienated, self-absorbed beings, living in constant fear, an ordinary man devastated by the death of his wife and child, spiraling down into madness, a girl of sixteen trying to transcend the harsh reality that surrounds her thought sex, the sanguinarius creep with bizarre cooking habits and the man without living wishes.
The official video for “Now I Am One (Trip Mix)” by Just Jules.
TUESDAY OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 AND 10 PM (Ticket info below)
FB EVENT
The Imagine Science Film Festival returns for the third year with an evening at Spectacle. The theme of the 11th ISFF is SURVIVAL:
Crisis. Entropy. Extinction. Last year we celebrated the past ten years of the Imagine Science Film Festival’s existence, but this year we take a hard look ahead at the high stakes for all life on an Earth facing climate change, species loss, nuclear proliferation, the imminent exhaustion of our energy resources. Existence itself is not assured.
But wherever we consider such direly high stakes, we can also aspire to a better world. New technologies constantly open new possibilities and sociopolitical change opens the way for new ideas to take hold. For every dystopia, a corresponding utopia may be within reach. It may be a struggle, but the record of all life is that of an eon-spanning fight to stay alive.
This year, send us your speculative hopes and fears, your studies of tumultuous natural history and startling feats of adaptation, all your endings and new beginnings. Apoptosis versus immortal cell lines. Half-lives and radical life extension. Obsolete inventions inspiring crucial breakthroughs. Illness and regeneration. The deaths of stars and the necessary paths to SURVIVAL.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM: SIGNALS, TRANSMISSIONS, VOICES
Various directors, 2016 – 2018.
85 min.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 PM
Glitching cats, phone sex with aliens, crystal healing, the mysterious universe. Each year, ISF reserves some of the wildest and most outré takes on scientific filmmaking for a recurring program at Spectacle Theater. Not so incidentally, many become favorites. These films, though rooted in scientific principles, transform traditional sci-film expectations with abstracted narratives, form-breaking documentary concepts, mind-bending visuals, and other essential experiments at the outer edges of our festival program. These techniques are no rarity in the rest of the festival, but never in such a concentration as here. This year’s program investigates communication in all its forms.
A stop-motion 16mm audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. Inspired by pseudo-scientific texts of the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was believed that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing, the film proposes an analogy between this belief and attraction of cinema. The title, Somnium Lapidum, or Dream Stones, is a reference to the imaginative content of the “Speculum Lapidum” and the dreamlike experience of cinematic viewership.
Long Distance Relationship
Dir. Carolina Markowicz, 2017.
Brazil, 5 min.
In Brazil, where all things are possible, a man takes part in an extraterrestrial phone sex operation.
In Glass Houses
Dir. Ariana Gerstein, 2017.
USA, 8 min.
An interview is conducted exploring methods used to facilitate a real research project whose aim it is to capture and analyze human micro-expressions for use by a variety of industries (including lie detection and entertainment/animation). But the particular research or the use of human subjects is really just a point of departure. This film takes a moment to touch on our use of technology and vice versa.
Persistence of Memory
Dir. Natalie Tsui, 2016.
Canada, 15 min.
A skilled programmer commences work for Galatea, a robotics company launching the next generation of personal companions. Unlike generic robot companions, the C-1000 is made to a client’s precise specifications, which either give the companion a unique personality and complex individuality, or replicate those of someone else. Against the backdrop of activist protests over outsourcing emotional connection, the programmer brings a C-1000 “to life” through trial and error.
Wherever You Go There We Are
Dir. Jesse McLean, 2017.
USA, 12 min.
In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.
Forest Paths
Dir. Michiel van Bakel, 2018.
Netherlands, 3 min.
A warped stroll through a forest. Animated still photographs reveal movement and light on the forest paths that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. Van Bakel made a ‘scanner-camera’ that extends human vision to near-infrared light in an other-worldly way. What’s this thing called vision? What’s the fundamental difference between what a robot discerns, what a flying insect detects or man’s observation?
Ugly
Dir. Nikita Diakur, 2017.
Germany, 12 min.
An ugly cat struggles to coexist in a fragmented and broken world, eventually finding a soulmate in a mystical chief. Choreographed in digital simulation errors and inspired by a story found on the internet, this could be the definitive melodrama of our times.
Phototaxis
Dir. Melissa Ferrari, 2017.
USA, 7 min.
Phototaxis draws parallels between Mothman, a prophetic and demonized creature in West Virginia lore, and Narcotics Anonymous, the primary treatment program in West Virginia’s addiction epidemic. Rooted in nonfiction, this experimental animated documentary contemplates synchronicity and the role of belief systems in perception and pseudoscience; the tendency to assign supernatural meaning to tragedy and the unknowable; anonymous and apocryphal oral histories; and the moth to the flame. To visualize these narratives, natural materials and pastel-on-paper palimpsest animation are woven together using a multiplane and analog overhead projection.
Sore Eyes for Infinity
Dir. Elli Vuorinen, 2016.
Finland, 12 min.
An optician’s workday is filled by a line of extraordinary customers, who, one by one, use the optical equipments in suspicious ways.
Poliangular
Dir. Alexandra Castellanos Solis, 2018.
Mexico, 8 min.
Searchers pursue mysterious and seemingly unreachable objects. And what will happen if they are found?
THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC BOX
Dir. Bodo Kox, 2017.
Poland. 103 min.
NEW YORK PREMIERE
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 10 PM
A man without a memory and a woman seeking more than contemporary life seems to offer grapple with a dystopian future Warsaw and are drawn into the 20th-century past. But such an escape may not be allowed. A unique love story unfolding under omnipresent crisis and totalitarian oversight, crossing between collapsing near future and Soviet history, The Man with the Magic Box nods to genre classics while remaining very much itself. The pleasure of viewing, as much as in the mysterious storyline and strange, perfectly strange performances by the leads, is in the subtle, meticulous detail of the world. Here, people are relentlessly cut off from one another, terrorism is either inescapable or a real-estate development tool, advertising uncomfortably personal, and all aspects of life metered by a credit chip implanted in the hand — all so unfortunately plausible as to flash by as almost-familiar background texture here. At turns bleak, absurd, unsettling, and oddly affecting, the film defies synopsis while advancing with effortless imagination.
Preceded by:
Expire
Magali Magistry, 2017.
France, 14 min.
A toxic fog blankets the planet forcing people to live confined. But when you are fifteen like Juliette, real life truly begins outside.
THE 12TH ANNUAL DRUID UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
dir. Various, 19??-20??
120 min, Worldwide
In Every Language known to man.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM: RIDING WILD (*Q&A*) TIX
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30 PM: SHORTS PROGRAM (*Q&A*) TIX FB
(These events are $10.)
After a dozen tours covering 13 states across the USA, the 12th Annual Druid Underground Film Festival busts out with a brand new two-hour program of shorts and found footage madness that will tour the US from NYC to Los Angeles.
Hosted by founder Billy Burgess and filled with shocking new images, subversive creativity, free raffle prizes and much more!
This is the series that WILLAMETTE WEEKLY says “assaults the cerebrum, as if David Lynch, Nicholas Winding Refn, Will Vinton, David Cronenberg, Salvador Dalí, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Gaspar Noé decided to mix LSD and DMT, then film the interior of their brains.”
RIDING WILD
dir. Charles Cohen, 2018
83 min, USA
**NYC PREMIERE, DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!**
(This event is $10.)
Dink leads a tribe of BMXers to a secret trail on a patch of forgotten woods in Baltimore City to escape the hassles and violence of their neighborhood. In the process, they create a community on wheels, always riding, always digging, always in motion, giving us a road movie stuck within the city limits.
CRUEL INTENTIONS 3
dir. Scott Ziehl, 2004.
USA, 85 min.
English.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24th
ONE NIGHT ONLY – 7:30 PM
ONLINE TICKETS
FB EVENT
CRUEL INTENTIONS 3 is a 2004 American teen drama film directed by Scott Ziehl and released direct-to-video in 2004. Despite its name, the film has almost no relation to the previous films in the series, except for the shared themes and the lead character in this film, Cassidy Merteuil, who is a cousin of one of the characters from the first film, Kathryn Merteuil.
Plot keywords: teen angst, sex, betrayal, wager, jealousy, love triangle, preparatory school, manipulation, sexual assault, seduction, infidelity, sequel, lust, bikini, leg spreading, cunnilingus
Text courtesy of Wikipedia, IMDB
MATCH CUTS is a weekly podcast centered on video, film and the moving image. Match Cuts Presents is dedicated to presenting de-colonialized cinema, LGBTQI films, Marxist diatribes, video art, dance films, sex films, and activist documentaries with a rotating cast of presenters from all spectrums of the performing and plastic arts and surrounding humanities. Match Cuts is hosted by Nick Faust and Kachine Moore.
THE PEOPLE’S DETOX
Dir. Jenna Bliss, 2018
NYC. 56 mins.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM
**PRESENTATION FROM NYC DSA OOPP (OPIOID OVERDOSE PREVENTION PROGRAM) AFTER ALL SCREENINGS. A PORTION OF TICKET SALES GOES TO SUPPORT THEIR WORK, AND A PORTION TO MUTULU SHAKUR’S NEW LAWSUIT AGAINST THE BUREAU OF PRISONS AND THE PAROLE BOARD.**
THE PEOPLE’S DETOX is a contemplative look at how the history of a revolutionary drug clinic reverberates through to contemporary notions of health and care. In November 1970, Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx was taken over through the collective organizing of local heroin addicts, revolutionary health organizations, the Young Lords, members of the Black Panther Party as well as other organizations. Through political education, the clinic examined the role of global politics in the influx of heroin into urban centers as well as the economic incentives of the established protocols for drug treatment. With the introduction of acupuncture as an aid in detoxification, eventually replacing pharmaceutical treatments, it was not only the the walls of the hospital that were breached but the very apparatus of addiction and recovery.
JENNA BLISS (b. 1984 Yonkers, NY) is an artist and filmmaker. Previous films include POISON THE CURE (2017) and two video series, DAY ONE (2017) and LETTERS (2013).
NYC DSA OOPP (THE NYC DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OPIOID OVERDOSE PREVENTION PROGRAM) dispenses naloxone to people and communities who experience high risk of overdose. We seek to work on the front lines of the overdose crisis, and to educate people who use drugs as well as the general public about the structural nature of addiction. Overdose reversal is an immediate emergency measure, but we recognize that the problem is structural, and requires structural solutions. Along with harm-reducing measures like needle exchanges and safe injection facilities, we demand healthcare without a profit motive, patient involvement in their own care, as well as decriminalization, total decarceration, safe housing, education, and healthy food as fundamental rights, and an end to segregation, deprivation, and dispossession, to poverty and the wage system. We recognize that capitalism itself is the fundamental cause, the vector of disease. The same brutal system that requires and feeds on extraction, marginalization, racialization, and oppression to uplift a wealthy few creates the conditions for disease among the people. capitalism is the disease vector–socialism is the means for the cure.
