Concerning Violence
Seventh Cinema
30
January 2025
30
January
2025
6
March 2025
We are pleased that Seventh Cinema is back for a second season!
This year's curated film program is tethered to Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s often-misunderstood and overly read essay Concerning Violence from his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). For this season, we have curated films that overlap with Fanon’s ideas and sentiments in the spirit he intended - not as an endorsement of violence itself, but as a confrontation of the processes that drive colonised people to necessarily use violence.
In the wake of Invasion Day, and in solidarity with the Aboriginal peoples of this Country, our season premiere screening presents the duality of colonial law and Indigenous Law in so-called Australia. Two Laws (1982) - a documentary that discusses conflicts that arise from the violent imposition of the colonial mindset on First Nations peoples worldviews. This season also includes; Embrace of the Serpent (2015) - a visually stunning feature filmed on 35mm in the Amazon, set against the violent backdrop of the colonial rubber trade. Contos do Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion) (2023) - a meditative film essay that reflects on the physical and cultural remnants of colonial atrocities in our present landscapes. Born in Flames (1983) - a guerrilla style mockumentary that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternate socialist democratic United States. Our season concludes with the seminal film The Battle of Algiers (1966), one of cinema’s great political masterpieces, which charts the Algerian national liberation movement from its beginnings in 1954 through to independence in 1962. The film is said to have inspired the Black Panthers, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.
We welcome you to join us in viewing these, and other important films, and in reflecting on their profound relevance to the present. This season invites a critical examination of the ever-unfolding neo/colonial policrisis - both within our local context and further afield. In engaging with Fanon’s work, we are called to consider the responsibilities of Western intellectuals and nations in perpetuating or dismantling colonial systems. Most importantly, these films challenge us to ask: what is our role in revolution?
- Kori Miles and Lucie Loy
—
Seventh Cinema is an outdoor cinema season spanning six weeks. Screenings are free to attend. All are welcome. Reserve tickets through the following links...
ϟ 30 January
White people don't understand that there are two laws. White people have different laws from Aboriginal people. TWO LAWS is a film about history, law and life in the community of Borroloola in far North Queensland. The films offers viewers a remarkable and different way of seeing and hearing. Like the film BACKROADS it is one of the few productions at that time in which Aboriginal people had creative input. The impetus for TWO LAWS came from the community themselves. There was substantial collaboration with the film makers before and during the shooting period. It is one of the most outstanding films to be made during the 1980s. It is a historical analysis of what, nearly forty years later, is an increasingly contemporary question. Two Laws.
ϟ 6 February
Embrace of the Serpent (2015) 2h 5m. Directed by Ciro Guerra.
Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
ϟ 20 February
TAMBAKU CHAAKILA OOB ALI documents, re-enacts, and takes forward one of the largest movements of unorganised labor of its time and context, which sparked unionising processes across India throughout the 1980s. In the spirit of mobilising for the leftist labor and the women’s movements the Yugantar collective spent four months with female tobacco factory workers in Nipani, Karnataka in India, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions, discussing strategies for unionising and steps to broaden solidarities for strike actions, and filming previously unseen circumstances inside the factories.
—
The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the black revolutionary founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women - across all lines of race, class, and sexual orientation - emerges to blow the system apart. Filmed guerrilla style on the streets of pre-gentrification New York, BORN IN FLAMES is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.
ϟ 27 February
This experimental film without dialogue makes innovative use of sound to tell the story of a shepherd who, having lost his wife, children and cattle after his homeland is stricken by drought, goes to the city to find work. Through a poetic association of images the film critiques the dehumanising effects on the Sudanese people of the Sharia ruled government that was in power in the early eighties.
—
In Sudan, cinema is a thing of the past, but four directors and lifelong friends refuse to accept it. They learned their art abroad - one of them is jokingly referred to as the Sudanese Eisenstein by the others. With their Sudanese film club, the men struggle to keep their film culture alive. Much of their work has been lost, but a few excerpts are included in the documentary.
To introduce others to the magic of film, they decide to rent a dilapidated old open-air cinema for a big free screening. But how do you do this in a country where there are power cuts, you lack the equipment and infrastructure, and the call to prayer blares out from mosques on all sides? “How did we used to do it?” they wonder, laughing. Then they realise that there didn’t used to be a call to prayer. Sudan’s repressive and violent history remains in the background, and film is clearly still out of favor with the regime. Nevertheless, the men remain hopeful.
ϟ 6 March 2025
Rene Laloux's mesmerising sci-fi animated feature won the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation. Set in a distant world, the 'Fantastic Planet', where tiny humans, or Oms, are kept as pets by large alien creatures, the Draags, the film travels through a strange and beautiful world. Soon, one Om absconds with a Draag knowledge device, using the tool to instigate a wild Om uprising against his captors. Inspired by the Russsian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late '60s, Laloux's vision immediately drew comparisons to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes. Today, the film can be seen to prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its political and social concerns, epic imagination and animation techniques.
—
On a hot summer morning in 1444, in the fishing village of Lagos, southern Portugal, a group of African people disembarked. In the field next to the port, they were given away as slaves to the local noblemen and merchants. For the next 400 years, more than six million Africans would be trafficked in Portuguese ships to Europe and across the Atlantic.
On a rainy winter afternoon in 2009, in Lagos, archeologists excavating the site where an underground parking lot was under construction, began to find human skeletons. Working on the site for the following five months, as the parking lot was being built around them, the archeologists uncovered the skeletons of 158 enslaved African men, women, and children. Their bodies had been dumped in a XV-century landfill.
Intertwining these two storylines, Tales of Oblivion threads tales of violence and brutality from the past with sights and sounds of the present. Evoking what took place in these sites and conjuring memories from the past, Tales of Oblivion is a film-territory where we have no choice but to look at how the present continues to be shaped by the history we carry within us.
ϟ 13 March 2025
The Battle of Algiers (1966) 2h 1m. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
—
We are very grateful to the City of Yarra for their ongoing support, and for recognising the value in projects like this one. Seventh Cinema is supported through the City of Yarra's Annual Grants program. We would also like to acknowledge all of the filmmakers and the dedicated individuals working in small film distribution companies for collaborating with us to share these films. Thank you!
We are pleased that Seventh Cinema is back for a second season!
This year's curated film program is tethered to Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s often-misunderstood and overly read essay Concerning Violence from his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). For this season, we have curated films that overlap with Fanon’s ideas and sentiments in the spirit he intended - not as an endorsement of violence itself, but as a confrontation of the processes that drive colonised people to necessarily use violence.
In the wake of Invasion Day, and in solidarity with the Aboriginal peoples of this Country, our season premiere screening presents the duality of colonial law and Indigenous Law in so-called Australia. Two Laws (1982) - a documentary that discusses conflicts that arise from the violent imposition of the colonial mindset on First Nations peoples worldviews. This season also includes; Embrace of the Serpent (2015) - a visually stunning feature filmed on 35mm in the Amazon, set against the violent backdrop of the colonial rubber trade. Contos do Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion) (2023) - a meditative film essay that reflects on the physical and cultural remnants of colonial atrocities in our present landscapes. Born in Flames (1983) - a guerrilla style mockumentary that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternate socialist democratic United States. Our season concludes with the seminal film The Battle of Algiers (1966), one of cinema’s great political masterpieces, which charts the Algerian national liberation movement from its beginnings in 1954 through to independence in 1962. The film is said to have inspired the Black Panthers, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.
We welcome you to join us in viewing these, and other important films, and in reflecting on their profound relevance to the present. This season invites a critical examination of the ever-unfolding neo/colonial policrisis - both within our local context and further afield. In engaging with Fanon’s work, we are called to consider the responsibilities of Western intellectuals and nations in perpetuating or dismantling colonial systems. Most importantly, these films challenge us to ask: what is our role in revolution?
- Kori Miles and Lucie Loy
—
Seventh Cinema is an outdoor cinema season spanning six weeks. Screenings are free to attend. All are welcome. Reserve tickets through the following links...
ϟ 30 January
White people don't understand that there are two laws. White people have different laws from Aboriginal people. TWO LAWS is a film about history, law and life in the community of Borroloola in far North Queensland. The films offers viewers a remarkable and different way of seeing and hearing. Like the film BACKROADS it is one of the few productions at that time in which Aboriginal people had creative input. The impetus for TWO LAWS came from the community themselves. There was substantial collaboration with the film makers before and during the shooting period. It is one of the most outstanding films to be made during the 1980s. It is a historical analysis of what, nearly forty years later, is an increasingly contemporary question. Two Laws.
ϟ 6 February
Embrace of the Serpent (2015) 2h 5m. Directed by Ciro Guerra.
Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
ϟ 20 February
TAMBAKU CHAAKILA OOB ALI documents, re-enacts, and takes forward one of the largest movements of unorganised labor of its time and context, which sparked unionising processes across India throughout the 1980s. In the spirit of mobilising for the leftist labor and the women’s movements the Yugantar collective spent four months with female tobacco factory workers in Nipani, Karnataka in India, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions, discussing strategies for unionising and steps to broaden solidarities for strike actions, and filming previously unseen circumstances inside the factories.
—
The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the black revolutionary founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women - across all lines of race, class, and sexual orientation - emerges to blow the system apart. Filmed guerrilla style on the streets of pre-gentrification New York, BORN IN FLAMES is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.
ϟ 27 February
This experimental film without dialogue makes innovative use of sound to tell the story of a shepherd who, having lost his wife, children and cattle after his homeland is stricken by drought, goes to the city to find work. Through a poetic association of images the film critiques the dehumanising effects on the Sudanese people of the Sharia ruled government that was in power in the early eighties.
—
In Sudan, cinema is a thing of the past, but four directors and lifelong friends refuse to accept it. They learned their art abroad - one of them is jokingly referred to as the Sudanese Eisenstein by the others. With their Sudanese film club, the men struggle to keep their film culture alive. Much of their work has been lost, but a few excerpts are included in the documentary.
To introduce others to the magic of film, they decide to rent a dilapidated old open-air cinema for a big free screening. But how do you do this in a country where there are power cuts, you lack the equipment and infrastructure, and the call to prayer blares out from mosques on all sides? “How did we used to do it?” they wonder, laughing. Then they realise that there didn’t used to be a call to prayer. Sudan’s repressive and violent history remains in the background, and film is clearly still out of favor with the regime. Nevertheless, the men remain hopeful.
ϟ 6 March 2025
Rene Laloux's mesmerising sci-fi animated feature won the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation. Set in a distant world, the 'Fantastic Planet', where tiny humans, or Oms, are kept as pets by large alien creatures, the Draags, the film travels through a strange and beautiful world. Soon, one Om absconds with a Draag knowledge device, using the tool to instigate a wild Om uprising against his captors. Inspired by the Russsian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late '60s, Laloux's vision immediately drew comparisons to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes. Today, the film can be seen to prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its political and social concerns, epic imagination and animation techniques.
—
On a hot summer morning in 1444, in the fishing village of Lagos, southern Portugal, a group of African people disembarked. In the field next to the port, they were given away as slaves to the local noblemen and merchants. For the next 400 years, more than six million Africans would be trafficked in Portuguese ships to Europe and across the Atlantic.
On a rainy winter afternoon in 2009, in Lagos, archeologists excavating the site where an underground parking lot was under construction, began to find human skeletons. Working on the site for the following five months, as the parking lot was being built around them, the archeologists uncovered the skeletons of 158 enslaved African men, women, and children. Their bodies had been dumped in a XV-century landfill.
Intertwining these two storylines, Tales of Oblivion threads tales of violence and brutality from the past with sights and sounds of the present. Evoking what took place in these sites and conjuring memories from the past, Tales of Oblivion is a film-territory where we have no choice but to look at how the present continues to be shaped by the history we carry within us.
ϟ 13 March 2025
The Battle of Algiers (1966) 2h 1m. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
—
We are very grateful to the City of Yarra for their ongoing support, and for recognising the value in projects like this one. Seventh Cinema is supported through the City of Yarra's Annual Grants program. We would also like to acknowledge all of the filmmakers and the dedicated individuals working in small film distribution companies for collaborating with us to share these films. Thank you!
Lucie Loy
Lucie Loy is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and writer (currently) based in Northern NSW and Naarm (Melbourne). Alongside her independent practice which spans visual art, publishing, writing and curating she has committed much of her professional capacity to platforming independent, artist-led and experimental practice. Through her work with artist-run projects locally and internationally, Lucie has explored notions of the ‘artist-led’, platforming the importance of art and artists critically and creatively addressing global and social struggles. Working with the aesthetics of hope, resistance and imagination, as well as through policy advocacy, activism and frustrating bureaucratic frameworks, Lucie’s practice and work seeks to explore the intersection of art, political ecology, social and environmental justice and postcolonial globalisation. Lucie is interested in collaboration, ideas of the commons and critical, transdisciplinary projects. Her recent research explores biopolitics, notions of power and the philosophies and contexts of post-truth.
Kori Miles
Kori is an interdisciplinary and process-based takataapui artist, currently working and living on sacred Wurundjeri land in Naarm/Melbourne. They are of Maaori (Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Ahuru, Tainui/Waikato), Italian, Scottish & Anglo-Celtic descent, but born and raised in so-called Australia. They predominantly utilise performance, installation, sculpture, photography, video and poetry as mediums to explore/articulate ideas, knowledge and stories.
Kori’s practice is guided by the stories of Maaui—the trickster demigod of Maaori mythology—and how Maaui’s clever wit combined with the powers of shape-shifting and interdimensional travel are used to undermine structural authority and cause a paradigm shift in power distribution - a social and systemic change that benefits those with less privilege and access. Kori’s practice manifests visions that confront the ongoing damage of colonial and heteronormative social structures, whilst concurrently fostering a space for contemplation on transgression, eroticism, liberation, humour, healing, regeneration and resilience.