Other Cinema: Scritti Politti1: KHALIL/SWEITZER’s EMPTY METAL

In our co-presentation with PFA, both sides of the Bay are mobilized by the excitement around this feature debut from a pair of young radicals out of Brooklyn’s fabled Union Docs incubator. With mass surveillance and pervasive policing as context, both outside and in the fiction, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, here in the flesh, have managed to conjure a revolutionary spirit at world’s end. Set in the near future, their speculative drama, just a few degrees off our current climate of national collapse, opens up a space for imaginative story-telling...but is still close enough to a possible present to pop up in Doc Fests! In their taut thriller, a punk band is coerced into an assassination plot by militant Native Americans, with support from hackers and hermits. The lives of these several people, at extreme poles of the nation’s social consciousness, weave together into a collective against our American Meltdown. The evening opens with a selection of trailers and clips from the subversive cinema that inspired our guests: Ice, Born in Flames, Southland Tales, et al.