The Brooklyn Rail

If longstanding institutions are enabling humanity’s most destructive tendencies, can an effective alternative be mounted? It’s a question that’s plagued organizers on the left, one which remains a formidable challenge as cultural gatekeepers around the globe come under increasing scrutiny for their complicity in AI-abetted surveillance, suppression of free speech, and genocide. The latter has proven an incendiary talking point in American culture with the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza testing the malleable notions of humanity granted by late-capitalist hegemony. With that in mind, what responsibility do film workers comprising the “precariat” have in speaking truth to power, especially when their livelihoods are at stake?

The New York Counter Film Festival (NYCFF), which ran concurrently with the New York Film Festival, sought to propose a possible answer to this difficult question. Like any festival, NYCFF subsisted on the extensive efforts of its team of radical film workers and volunteers who remain publicly unnamed for fear of professional reprisal. While the festival’s mission foregrounded the urgency of providing direct aid to Palestinian civilians, the programming embodied an ethos firmly rooted in transnational solidarity between workers and activists.

Fittingly, the festival featured a program focused on international labor. Titled “Shovel or Spade,” the series of six shorts emphasizes the interconnected networks of various ethnicities and cultures which inform historiographies of proletarian struggle. Both Advik Beni’s Jikele Maweni Ndiyahamba [Let’s Go to The Mines] (2022) and Zaina Bseiso’s When Light is Displaced (2021) are essays on bilocation, transposing their homelands (South Africa and Palestine, respectively) onto California. Beni juxtaposes the Marikana Mines Massacre of 2012 with the abandoned mining structures situated in Johannesburg, California, while a conversation Bseiso has with her father on the last orange grove in Los Angeles echoes their familial heritage as Jaffa orange farmers.

Pairing the shortest films of the program provides distinct confrontations with neocolonialism’s hauntological dimensions. Beni’s contrast between derelict mining structures and archival footage of the massacre explicitly, if a tad didactically, theorizes the imperial violence obfuscated by the ideological superstructure of the West. Bseiso’s film also visualizes this dynamic, showing an orange picker cast in a negative photographic exposure, a spectral absence imprinted upon a serene vista of mass production. Yet her conversation with her father personalizes this quandary in a way Beni’s footage of atrocities cannot, and her father’s insistence on resisting realism in her filmmaking practice doesn’t privilege escapism more than it urges her (and us) to tentatively conceptualize counter-hegemonic narratives.

Beni takes up this challenge of circumventing the constraints of realism in Ilanga Alikho [The Sun is Missing] (2022), the second of his films showcased in this program. A man (the film’s co-writer, Maqhawe Junior Madonsela) wanders the valleys of KwaZulu-Natal, addressing his mother in voiceover narration as he excavates a mound of earth and buries a chicken head we saw graphically decapitated in the film’s opening scene. These initial passages, deceptively unassuming in their observational patience, give way to celluloid abstraction as the film itself collapses in a violent flurry of haptic scratches reminiscent of Stan Brakhage. This correlation between the man’s digging and the subsequent rupture of his (and the film’s) reality underlines the fitful impact of labor isolated from a political mission in a post-Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, the man professes to his mother an “unrealized dream” which persists within the cultural imaginary of what Beni has described as a generation beset by “apathy and numbness.”

Yet, what if the act of resistance, rather than realization, should be the immediate focus for the working class? This is ostensibly the thesis imparted by the late Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. His biography is obliquely summarized in the essay film Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production (2024). Longer and more ambitious than Let’s Go to the Mines, the film intersperses myriad archival footage alongside onscreen text drawn from Amel’s writing, mapped out onto a contemporary milieu nearly forty years after his assassination. Directors Mary Jirmanus Saba and Tareq Rantisi house images framed within images, their mise-en-abyme affording footage shot by professional and non-professional filmmakers (i.e. social media) equal importance. This non-hierarchical treatment of various archival sources reconstitutes the ethos of its central subject with deft urgency. Indeed, across its fourteen-minute runtime, the film draws explicit links between Amel’s investment in the geopolitical role of Islam to American rhetoric, most notoriously Ronald Reagan’s infamous comparison of the Mujahideen to the Founding Fathers in a 1985 speech. More than serving to vindicate Amel’s political philosophy, the film positions him as the starting point for a rich, intersectional historiography of collective struggle against colonialism in the Middle East.

Basma al-Sharif’s Capital (2023) repurposes archival material to gradually artificial ends in a scabrous satire on bourgeois insularity at the end of the world. The film focuses on the political configuration of domestic spaces within Italian and Egyptian metropolitan hubs. These spaces are mediated by a television set placed in a sparsely decorated set where a woman (Francesca Tasini) sits slouched in her chair. The characters overheard or seen on the television—most prominently a ventriloquist with a sock puppet (fellow moving image artist Diego Marcon)—allude to fascism and neocolonial architecture which occludes human labor on the promise of affluence through endless security and surveillance.

The second of al-Sharif’s works to be featured in NYCFF after Deep Sleep (2014), Capital ambitiously assays global capitalism’s impact on the Middle East. The resurgence of fascism is signaled by the homage to Telefoni Bianchi films (apolitical comedies popular during Mussolini’s reign) as evidenced by the nameless woman’s orgiastic phone conversation with a man reciting names of software companies. As the woman dances to Nino Ferrer’s pop hit “Le Sud” with visuals of cascading, virtual simulacra of urban designs, al-Sharif’s point becomes inescapable, if disappointingly didactic. Her pessimism towards Europe’s political trajectory, while not unfounded, informs her didacticism to a fault, yielding an ambitious yet ungainly polemic. Conversely, the final film of the program Obzornik 242 – Sunčane Pruge [Newsreel 242 – Sunny Railways] (2023) plumbs the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Europe to revitalize a leftist idealism for the future. A documentary meditation that revisits extant evidence of the Sarajevo-Šamac railroad’s construction in post-war Yugoslavia. Photographs of the workers, hailing from several countries throughout Europe, are physically held by the filmmaker Nika Autor over the present-day landscape where they were taken. When stills are suddenly revealed to be from extensive footage, the feeling of bearing witness to a newly revived, nearly forgotten history is electrifying.

While Autor views this chapter of labor history through an elegiac lens, she refuses to privilege a fatalistic form of nostalgia. Women and girls gather near the present-day rails, facing the camera in a silent address while the narrator speaks of a desire for a “more just” world, free from colonialism. In its resilient optimism borne from industrialization’s betrayal of the working class, Autor’s parting shot echoes the closing passages of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Like Pynchon, Autor mourns this catastrophic betrayal without entirely ceding hope for succeeding generations to undo the damage.

More than anything, that cautious optimism was the strongest throughline of the NYCFF’s inaugural edition. The list of demands its organizers issued to Lincoln Center remain, by and large, unmet, and the jury’s still out on how future iterations will lay the groundwork for politically impactful grassroots film programming in New York. If nothing else, the NYCFF’s adjuration of the status quo is admirably instructive for film workers both nostalgic for the communal pastime of moviegoing and determined to use cinema as a restorative practice in a fractured world.