While Lizzie Borden’s features BORN IN FAMES and WORKING GIRLS have taken their place as landmarks of feminist cinema, her debut—the fascinating experimental documentary REGROUPING—has gone largely unseen. A multilayered, self-reflexive portrait of a 1970s New York City feminist collective, the film charts the rifts that form within the group and between its members and the filmmaker—a breakdown that is reflected in the film’s radical splintering of sound and image.

Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living.

Winner of the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Réel 2024 and Best Film of the Encounter Program at Berlinale 2024. Direct action is a tactical strategy of protest that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means. DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France: a 150-person strong rural collective that successfully resisted an international airport expansion project in 2018, created an autonomous zone between 2012 and 2018, survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state and spawned a new ecological movement in 2021. 

Curated by MFA candidate Tom Dixon this program will feature 16mm prints from the UWM Film Department’s Cinema Arts Archive. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

With artist Lisa Truttmann live in person for a Q&A after the screening! Lisa Truttmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. In her artistic practice, she combines documentary, essayistic, and poetic methods to investigate the sociologies and ecologies of landscapes and architectures. She is interested in relationships between human and non-human agents as well as in their spaces of interaction.