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West Coast Premiere

In this entertaining, yet educational debut feature documentary, “Live From UB” takes us through the transition of Mongolia as a new nation learning how to take its first few steps and shows how urban Mongolians have used Rock music to overcome the powers of Soviet-style socialism, Orientalism and globalization over the past three decades. Through their music, the rockers of Ulaanbaatar (UB) are articulating their own understanding of what it means to be an urban Mongolian in a quickly modernizing city. Ultimately, this is an optimistic tale told with a unique voice that will lift the spirits of those who fear that globalization means a homogenized world. Dir Lauren Knapp, Mongolia/2015.

*Filmmaker in attendance for a post-screening Q&A

TICKET LINK:  https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1076659

 US Premiere

In a region full of tension, artists in the Middle East have struggled for years to express themselves freely and to promote more liberal attitudes within their societies. During the Arab Spring, like many others of this new Arab generation, local artists had high hopes for the future and took part in the protests. Rappers, graffiti artists, poets and filmmakers rushed toward the freedom. However, after years of turmoil and instability, young Arabs now have to challenge both old and new problems, being torn between feelings of disillusion and a vague hope for a better future. “Yallah! Underground” follows some of today’s most important and progressive underground artists from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Israel through years of rapid change until today. If you are yearning to hear some good news and cultural signs of life from a region that is often portrayed in uniquely pessimistic terms, this confident and fresh film is just the thing. Dir Farid Eslam, 85 min, UK/2015

TICKET LINK:  https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1076649

Courtney Fellion’s freshly-inked “Manifestoes and Declarations” issue of Canyon Cinemazine#4 kicks off the media-art component of SOS-SF, a 2-week course of creative resistance to the corporate onslaught on our City. As artists’ and cultural spaces are daily steamrolled, we fight back with the Anti-Eviction Mapping’s Project’s oral histories, Jeff Taylor/Whispered Media’s Boom (exc.), Rio Yanez on Mission galleries, Peter Menchini’s brave reports on the Midtown, Vanguard, and Ed Lee shams, Jonathan Youtt, Josh Wolf, and Carla Leshne’s chronicles of CELLspace activism…and Karyn Smoot’s ATA window installation! Anchoring these tactical reports is the oh-so-strategic West Coast debut of Deep State, a long-form Flaherty-nominated cine-tract on the global wave of opposition against the neo-liberal “market”. Inspired by the Occupy Movement, written by China Miéville, and masterfully montaged by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza—also displaced from their London underground film lab no.w.here–this Vertovian essay ponders possible actions against Capitalist monoculture.

reclaim the streets