Political films

Based on the idea of N**i stay-behind agents who remained in the occupied territories after World War II as resistance to the threat of communism, NATO and the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies, organized the Gladio network.

Between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union, teams of secret agents killed innocent civilians to keep Europe "free from communism" and under the influence of their political bosses.

This is the first part of a trilogy produced by BBC Timewatch, which analyzes the origins of the Gladio secret network, through conversations with main protagonists.

Gladio (1/3) The Ringmasters - BBC, 1992 Based on the idea of N**i stay-behind agents who remained in the occupied territories after World War II as resistance to the threat of communism, NATO and t...

https://politfilm.com/2019/03/12/the-old-school-of-capitalism/

The main protagonists of The Old School of Capitalism are workers, victims of privatization and “losers of transition” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the new capitalists, who have bought their companies for pennies.

Now, combine this explosive mixture characteristic for the first half of the 2000s, with a group of anarchists who decide to show their class solidarity by kidnapping the bosses and bringing them to the factory to answer to the workers they ruined. It is a winning combination of the naked truth, satire and tragedy in which Žilnik shows the true nature of the neoliberal transition in Serbia.

In essence, this is a movie without actors. The vast majority of actors are non-professionals, most of whom were real life factory workers before the privatization. Žilnik takes it a step further by not only enlisting workers on strike to appear as workers on strike, but by hiring capitalists to perform as capitalists, and real-life anarchists to complete his narrative in the role of anarchists.

Besides filmed movie scenes, there’s a lot of authentic documentary material, as well as hybrid situations where the “actors” are placed in the documentary environment. For example, workers on strike are acting as themselves, while they participate in trade union protests in Belgrade, where they retell other protestors about fictional events in the film as if they really happened. While discussing these “events” in an authentic documentary environment, the boundary between reality and fiction is gradually fading.

The same approach is applied with the dialogues. Since actors in the film represent the same positions they represent in real life, there was no written dialogue on the shooting. Everyone says what he really thinks and acts from his actual political position. This explains why the class conflict is so realistic.

It is particularly interesting to see ― with a ten-year distance ― how empty the neoliberal narrative is, and how easily and swiftly it established complete hegemony in the Serbian society.

It’s the narrative the capitalists in the film used to pacify and disorient the workers. Keywords – euro-integrations, foreign investors, transition – are actually codes for de-industrialization and devastation of the society, accompanied by systematic violence of large proportions and total plunder of social and state property.

In addition, we clearly see that in these circumstances the working class of Serbia was defeated in advance by being defeated ideologically. Mainstream trade unions accepted and reproduced the narrative of the ruling class, placing themselves in the service of privatization and often openly sabotaging the interests of workers. The working class in Serbia did not have a political articulation of its own class position and its own class interests. There wasn’t a single mass workers’ organization capable of leading a wide confrontation with the ruling class that organized the plunder of social property and conducted a shock therapy that pushed a huge number of working people into total poverty.

The Old School of Capitalism has been particularly popular in France as the showing of the film coincided with actual cases of real-life kidnappings of bosses by workers due to great discontent and social turmoil caused by the global economic crisis of 2008.

https://politfilm.com/2019/03/12/the-old-school-of-capitalism/

In a movie without actors, Žilnik shows the true nature of the neoliberal transition in Serbia

The Old School of Capitalism Stara skola kapitalizma (2009) Director: Želimir Žilnik Runtime: 122 min The main protagonists of The Old School of Capitalism are workers, victims of privatization and “losers of transition&…

https://politfilm.com/2019/02/08/diaz-dont-clean-up-this-blood/

In July of 2001, over 200.000 people took to the streets of Genoa in protest against a meeting of the G8 – the group of the worlds’ eight most powerful industrial countries whose summit decisions were to have a global impact on the world. In the aftermath of the protest, there were hundreds of injured, and 23-year-old activist Carlo Giuliani was killed when he confronted a Carabinieri vehicle. He was shot with a firearm and was ran over twice by a police Land Rover.

Day after this big anti-globalist protests in Genoa, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz school, where the temporary headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum was located, alongside with Indymedia ― an independent media organization, as well as activist lawyers who provided free legal services to protest participants and collected documentation on the police brutality during the protests. At the moment when 500 members of the police and carabinieri stormed the building, there were around one hundred people sleeping inside, among them many journalists and young people who came from different European countries to take part in the protest.

The film relies on documentary material and depicts these events extremely realistically, especially the atrocious police beating of everyone they came across in the building, seriously wounding many people, causing some to sustain life-critical injuries and even coma. Those who did not end up on the life support in the hospital were arrested and transferred to a police barracks where they were abused and brutally tortured for several more days.

In addition to extreme brutality against activists, police destroyed a large amount of computer and media equipment, took all hard drives and destroyed all cameras they found in the building. After that, police officers went on to set up a false evidence campaign aiming to present this school as a black block stronghold, as well as an improvised hospital for people with existing injuries from the protests.

It is important to understand that this attack wasn’t accidental in any way. It was planned at the highest levels of police and government. Besides destroying computer equipment and evidence against the police, the goal was to criminalize the movement and instigate a media lynching, but also to deeply traumatize a large number of activists and thus passivize or break the protest movement.

The gruesome police violence during the Diaz raid that is presented can be compared with the cult film “The Strawberry Statement“, which covers the Columbia University protests of 1968 and the brutal intervention of the US Police and National Guard.

Particularly interesting is the fact that afterward no police officer was tried for torture, because in 2001 the Italian law did not recognize torture as a criminal offense. Movie scenes of humiliation and torture that took place after the transfer of the arrestees into the police barracks are irresistibly reminiscent of films about military-fascist dictatorships in Latin America. It’s the same politics, the same method, the same interests.

This film should be a kind of a lesson to anyone involved in any protest or social movements. Know what to expect if a protest actually jeopardizes someone’s interests – in the sense that every social conflict is part of the struggle between social classes. Although this struggle is mainly of low intensity, contended to individual strikes and protests, if a movement actually threatens the interests of the ruling class, the conflict will soon turn into a class war in which the ruling class won’t choose the means, nor heed to victims.

It is therefore crucial to understand the class nature of the society we live in, and the implications it has. One certainly shouldn’t be naive and think that the state and the police have anything to do with law or justice.

This is one of the films that everyone should watch. Based on actual events.

https://politfilm.com/2019/02/08/diaz-dont-clean-up-this-blood/

This is one of the films that everyone should watch. Based on actual events.

Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood (2012) Director: Daniele Vicari Actors: Claudio Santamaria, Jennifer Ulrich, Elio Germano Runtime: 127 min In July of 2001, over 200.000 people took to …

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