[illegal_cinema] is conceived as an open (self-) educational project of exchange and contextualization of the auteur, documentary, political, activist, queer, anarchist, censored and other marginalized and in the local context hardly accessible films. The project is open to everyone interested to propose films, with obligation to speak about them, to open up discussion, or to invite guests – wherewith we try to erase the boundaries between the editor (curator) and audience and to perform a long-term process of (collective) self-education. During its realization the project is constantly developing and expanding its original framework, generating different program-lines and trying to explore new modes of facilitating art and culture as a space for diverse knowledge production.

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND :: Sam Green, Bill Siegel :: February 28, 19:00

Posted: April 5th, 2009 | Author: marta.popivoda | Filed under: announcements | Tags: '68, documentary_film, terrorism | No Comments »

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2002, USA)
Directors: Sam Green, Bill Siegel
Duration: 92 min
Film from the illegal_cinema Belgrade archive

weather
In October 1969, hundreds of young people wielding lead pipes and clad in football helmets marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows. Thus began the “Days of Rage,” the first demonstration of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, this group of former student radicals waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Weathermen including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and David Gilbert speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI’s Most Wanted.
The Weather Underground emerged when Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government.
As an exploration of the Weathermen in the context of other social movements of the time, the film also features rare footage and interviews with former SDS members and the Black Panthers, further examining the U.S. government’s suppression of dissent during the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back at their years underground, former Weather Underground members paint a compelling portrait of troubled times, revolutionary times and the forces that drove their resistance home.

Awards:
•    Documentary award, Seattle International Film Festival, 2003
•    Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, 2003
•    Marlon Riggs Award, San Francisco Film Critics Circle, 2003
•    Critics Week Award, Locarno International Film Festival, 2003
•    Nomination IDA Award, International Documentary Association, 2003
•    Nomination for Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, 2003
•    Nomination DGA Award,Directors Guild of America, 2004
•    Nomination Academy Awards, USA, 2004

See online:
http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/reviews/The-Weather-Underground
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
http://www.samgreen.to/store/#weathe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Underground

Saturday, February 28, 19:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane