The re:assemblage collective presents Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theatre followed by a discussion with members of the producing collective Emek Bizim İstanbul. Presented with the short video, The Harris Project.

Friday, 17 March 2017, 7 PM
Followed by Skype Q+A with members of Emek Bizim İstanbul
Tickets at the door: $5-10 suggested donation

Trinity Square Video is excited to support the re:assemblage collective in presenting a screening of Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theatre (2016)by the Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim initiative with The Harris Project (1998) by Marcos Arriaga and Jeff Sterne.

Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theatre chronicles a prominent struggle that took place in the heart of Istanbul, paving the way to the Gezi Resistance. Through the eyes of the activists and spectators, it tells the story of the Emek Theater, which was demolished against people’s consent and common good, and turned into a shopping mall. The film is composed from footage from those who collectively resisted, and in this sense, aims to reflect the common imagination of the people who defended their right to the city. It carries the idea of a new publicness—which gained further visibility with the Gezi Resistance—to the cinema screen through a political mobilization for cinema itself.

Released in 1988, The Harris Project follows four filmmakers as they confront Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution. In the end, however, their documentary turns away from the political battle and begins to question the difficulties of making everything work within a constantly changing world.

BIOGRAPHIES

Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim is an initiative that was formed in 2010 to organize demonstrations and events against the demolition of Emek Movie Theater in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. Since 2013, the initiative has collected video and sound recordings of the demonstrations, made by activists and various filmmakers, which then turned into the documentary Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater.

Born in Lima, Peru, Marcos Arriaga studied Communications and worked as a photo-journalist before immigrating to Canada where he studied film at Sheridan College and York University’s MFA program in Film Production.

The re:assemblage collective is committed to championing underrepresented voices and perspectives through public film/video screenings. We are itinerant and intentional. We are “reassembling” assumptions about artist film/video practices: who is shown and the forms of works championed. We are inspired by Trinh Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage (1982). The re:assemblage collective is Christina Battle and Scott Miller Berry based in Southern Ontario.

Special thanks to Tangled Art + Disability for their support of this event.