TDM Open Seminars presents The Maribor Uprisings: A Live Participatory Film

Date: 

Monday, February 25, 2019, 6:00pm

Location: 

Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Room B04, 24 Quincy Street

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TDM Open Seminars presents The Maribor Uprisings: A Live Participatory Film, facilitated by Director Maple Razsa

About The Maribor Uprisings, directed by Maple Razsa and Milton Guillén

In the once prosperous industrial city of Maribor, Slovenia, anger over political corruption became unruly revolt. In The Maribor Uprisings--part film, part conversation, and part interactive experiment--you are invited to participate in the protests. Dramatic frontline footage from a video activist collective places you in Maribor as crowds surround and ransack City Hall under a hailstorm of tear gas canisters. As a viewer, you must decide collectively with your fellow audience members which cameras you will follow and therefore how the screening will unfold. Like those who joined the actual uprisings, you will be faced with the choice of joining non-violent protests or following rowdy crowds towards City Hall and greater conflict. These dilemmas parallel those faced by protesters everywhere as they grapple with what it means to resist. What sparks outrage? How are participants swept up in--and changed by--confrontations with police? Could something like this happen in your city? What would you do? 

For more info on The Maribor Uprisings, please visit http://mariboruprisings.org/

Maple Razsa is an Associate Professor and Director of Global Studies at Colby College. He is committed to using text, images, and sound to embody the lived experience, as well as the political imaginations of contemporary social movements. Trained as a filmmaker and anthropologist at Harvard University, Maple has conducted fieldwork with alterglobalization protesters, anarchist-punk squatters, migrant-labor organizers, video activists, and, most recently, opponents and transgressors of the European border regime. His films—including The Maribor Uprisings, Occupation: A Film About the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In, and Bastards of Utopia—have shown in festivals around the world, including CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and DOK Leipzig. The Society for Visual Anthropology named Uprisings the Best Feature Film of 2017. Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism (Indiana University Press, 2015), the written companion to the film of the same title, won the William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology. Maple has held fellowships from IREX, NSF, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, Fulbright and Truman Foundations. His current research project is Insurgent Mobilities (in collaboration with Nadia El-Shaarawi), an ethnography of refugee and activist struggles to enact freedom of movement in Europe.

Milton Guillén focuses in exploring the borders between fiction and documentaries to explore the cinematic intersections of ethnographic research and sensorial experiences. Milton earned his BA from Colby College in Anthropology and studied film production at the Film and Television Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague.  He's directed several short documentaries in Brazil, Nicaragua, and Kenya and is committed to engage in multiple platforms that strive for social justice.