17 November – 18:00 – Everybody to Kenmure Street
This screening will be introduced by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Professor of Social Change and Conflict at VU Amsterdam.
May 2021, Glasgow. When immigration officers detain two residents, the whole neighbourhood rises up. One local crawls under the van so the police can’t drive off, and a mass protest is born. Within no time the street becomes an organised village of resistance while a huge police presence looks on helplessly.
Everybody to Kenmure Street blends protesters’ footage with interviews and re-enacted scenes, including the comical conversations with the man under the van. The street’s name stems from a colonial past, yet it became a symbol of the power of civil resistance. A heartwarming film.
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg researches collective action, protest and social change. Why do people act together against injustice? How do protest movements emerge and develop? And what role do solidarity, group identity and the interaction between protesters and authorities play? This film gets to the heart of her work. It shows how a single act of resistance grows into a mass protest, how residents unite around a shared sense of injustice, and how that can lead to real change.
17 November – 20:45 – Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava
This screening will be introduced by Louise Wolff, PhD candidate in Sociology in the research group Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion at VU Amsterdam.
“Our family is cursed: out of my two children, one is gay and the other is coocoo,” Cuc tells her son Quang. When his neurodivergent sister Mai becomes pregnant, Quang decides to film his family. His free-spirited life in Hanoi clashes with the traditional way of life in Lào Cai province. His family knows nothing about his American partner or the wild outfits he wears to Hanoi’s gay clubs.
Gradually the grip of mutual disappointment loosens, partly thanks to the arrival of baby Guava. Quang and Mai finally talk about the past. Quang tells his parents about his boyfriend, and Cuc even joins him at a queer event. This is a moving portrait of a damaged Vietnamese family whose love endures despite everything.
Louise Wolff researches how gender and sexual minorities in the Netherlands navigate norms, both within queer communities and in broader society. Through ethnographic and co-creative methods, they centre knowledge drawn from diverse lived experiences. The film ties in seamlessly: how do you find your own way between who you are and what your family expects of you?
20 november - 18:00 - Romare Bearden: A Life in Collage
This screening will be introduced by Adrienne Rooney, Assistant Professor of Visual and Material Culture at VU Amsterdam.
A portrait of American artist Romare Bearden (1911–1988), told through interviews with artists, curators, writers and Bearden himself. Drawing on memories of North Carolina, New York and Pittsburgh, he made the lived experience of African Americans visible and helped build a collective memory.
The film shows how collage became his breakthrough in the 1960s. The technique allowed him to bring social and contemporary themes into his work. Jazz also played a key role, both in the club scene and in how he composed his work. His life motto, “You have to take what you find,” applied just as much to his use of found imagery. As one curator puts it, his achievement was to merge the mainstream and the blackstream.
Adrienne Rooney’s research foregrounds emancipatory artistic and counter-geographic practices in the Caribbean and the US South. The film ties in closely: how can art make visible the places, memories and stories that long remained out of view?
20 november - 20:30 - Last Movies
This screening will be introduced by Klaas de Zwaan, lecturer in media history, analysis and theory at VU Amsterdam.
Artist and writer Stanley Schtinter presents an alternative film history built from the last films public figures watched shortly before they died. Last Movies opens with Franz Kafka watching Chaplin’s The Kid and closes with an enraged Boris Vian dying at the premiere of an adaptation of his work. Along the way we meet a president, a murderer, a singer, a director and an actress, among others.
Why did members of the Heaven’s Gate cult watch Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies? Did Kurt Cobain see himself in Ada, the tragic heroine of Jane Campion’s The Piano? The creative editing draws surprising connections, while Schtinter reflects on the role of cinema in our lives. It is all held together by Jeremy Irons’s wry commentary.
Klaas de Zwaan researches the history of media crises and is fully dedicated to university teaching, with students as partners. The film ties in nicely: what do the films we watch say about who we are and the times we live in?