What Would It Mean to Win? Counter-globalization movement videos by Oliver Ressler

What Would It Mean To Win? - 2008, 40 min.

"What Would It Mean To Win?" was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists' preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?

"What Would It Mean To Win?", as the title implies, addresses this central question for the movement. During the Seattle demonstrations "we are winning" was a popular graffiti slogan that captured the sense of euphoria that came with the birth of a new movement. Since that time however this slogan has been regarded in a much more speculative manner. This film aims to move beyond the question of whether we are "winning" or not by addressing what would it actually mean to win.

When addressing the question "what would it mean to win?" John Holloway quotes Subcomandante Marcos who once described "winning" as the ability to live an "infinite film program" where participants could re-invent themselves each day, each hour, each minute. The animated sequences take this as their starting point to explore how ideas of social agency, struggle and winning are incorporated into our imagination of politics.

Interviewees: Emma Dowling, John Holloway, Adam Irissou, Tadzio Mueller, Michael Osterweil, Sarah T.

This is what democracy looks like! - 2002, 30 min.

In the video "This is what democracy looks like!" (not the Big Noise film about Seattle) anti-capitalist demonstrators take the role of active spokespersons, contrary to dominant media representations that denigrate them as either naive or violent chaotic rowdies. Conversations about the events in Salzburg were carried out with six demonstrators. The central themes developed in the video are; the limitation of basic democratic rights - which is shown mainly in the ban on demonstrating and the detainment of hundreds of people in police encirclement - and the tension between the limited physical force of a few demonstrators and the structural violence practiced by state power. Excerpts from the conversations are put together with my own video recordings and those from (video) activists in Salzburg. The camera angle corresponds with the perspective of the demonstrators, thereby placing video viewers in direct confrontation with the events.

Interviewees: Walter Baier, Tanja Jenni, Ingrid Popper, Michael Pröbsting, Daniel Sanin, Irene Zavarsky
Video material from Indymedia Austria, Filmliga Linz, offscreen - offenes film forum salzburg, UTV Vienna, Oliver Ressler