Films from the Frontlines
A film screening with Global Uprisings, organized by the Conflict Research Group and the Middle East and North Africa Research Group.
Global Uprisings is an independent news site and video series dedicated to showing responses to the economic crisis and authoritarianism. Since 2011, filmmaker Brandon Jourdan and researcher Marianne Maeckelbergh have produced 24 online viral documentary films about the uprisings, rebellions, revolts, and revolutions that have spread around the world. All of their films are completely free online at www.globaluprisings.org.
Their short films detail social movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Their films cover strikes and demonstrations in the UK, the large-scale housing occupations and street mobilizations in Spain, the various general strikes, protests, and factory occupations in Greece, the revolution in Egypt, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey, the 2014 social explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the revolt against austerity in Portugal, and the occupy movement and the recent protests over Michael Brown’s death in the United States.
The Global Uprisings series has received hundreds of thousands of online views, been translated into multiple languages, screened at various international film festivals, theaters, galleries, and other venues around the world, used in university and high school classrooms, screened on Democracy Now!, and on the US TV station Free Speech TV.
Global Uprisings Creators
Brandon Jourdan is a journalist and filmmaker who has contributed to Democracy Now!, the NY Times, CNN, Reuters, Deep Dish TV, Independent Media Center, Now with Bill Moyers, Foreign Exchange, and Free Speech TV. With over ten years of experience in documentary filmmaking and journalism, his films have played in film festivals around the world including DocLisboa, Movies That Matter, and the Aljazeera International Film Festival and featured in the 2005 Whitney Biennial, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Contemporary Art Meeting Point in Athens, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight. Since 2011, he has worked together with Marianne Maeckelbergh on www.globaluprisings.org, an independent news site and video series dedicated to showing responses to the economic crisis and authoritarianism.
Marianne Maeckelbergh is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press, 2009). She is cofounder of www.globaluprisings.org. She is currently a Marie Curie fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
When? Thursday December 18, 2014, 16:30-18:30
Where? Filmzaal Plateau, Paddenhoek 3, 9000 Gent.