The Juche Idea
A film by Jim Finn
n the late 1960’s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism. Inspired by the real-life story of the South Korean director kidnapped in the ’70s to invigorate the North Korean film industry, the film follows Yoon Jung Lee, a young video artist invited to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm.
The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant
A Film by Jim Finn
For four years in the 1860’s half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests, and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant follows General Grant’s path liberating the southern United States. It focuses not only on his battles but on massacres committed by Confederate armies and the role of enslaved people in the war.
Flower in Otomi
A film by Luisa Riley
On February 14th, 1974, 19-year-old Deni Prieto Stock was killed by the Mexican army in the town of Nepantla, along with four of her comrades in the Fuerzas de Liberacion Nacional (National Liberation Forces), a forerunner to the Zapatistas.
Her sister and other family members recount a cozy childhood spent between New York and Mexico City with parents who raised them to support leftist causes. A cousin shares letters that detail her radicalization, and former lovers describe her growing conviction, particularly following the killing of student protestors in the Tlatelolco massacre, that armed revolution was the only path to economic and social justice in Mexico.
