If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011), Marshall Curry & Sam Cullman

The ELF was responsible for large-scale acts of property destruction in the late 1990s as a radical form of environmentalist action. They would sabotage logging operations, commit arson to buildings, or burn down entire dealerships of SUVs. Between 1997 and 2009, ELF members caused over 40 million dollars of damage in the United States. A decade later, the film follows their story, legal battles and internal conflicts with unbelievable access and first-person accounts. As the climate crisis accelerates, some have begun to reevaluate the actions of this fringe group.

Daz Netz (2003), Lutz Dammbeck

The Net (translated to English) may be the most bonkers art documentary film of all time. Dammbeck weaves an incredible mesh of radical ideas, leading from the hippie movement, to MK ultra, to the early internet, into California ideology and eventually to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Keep an eye out for the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand. (There are a few scenes in German but 90% of the film is English language.) There is simply nothing else like it.

The Balcony (1963), Joseph Strick

I screened this film as part of an exhibition that I curated back in 2018. At the time, I was seeking to understand how irony poisoning had gripped a generation of young people who had gone from being online comedic trolls to earnest participants in radical politics. In the film, Johns visit a “role-play brothel”, not to buy sex but to indulge in elaborate fantasies about the lives they wish to lead. Many visitors dream of having authority and powerful positions in society. The Balcony is an amazing precedent for what society looks like when the LARPers take political power and live out their psycho fantasies for real.

Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee (2016), Nanette Burstein

I guess some people don’t know this but the inventor of McAfee anti-virus software was a huge anarcho-capitalist. After getting unimaginably rich from his software, he moved to Belize to create a drug fueled sovereign compound with lots of armed guards and prostitutes. He met his wife because she was a hit-woman that was hired to kill him but instead he seduced her and they later got married. He eventually flees the country because he murdered his neighbor over a property dispute. It’s a true libertarian story that goes far beyond parody.

In Time (2011), Andrew Niccol

Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried star in a Marxist allegory about the labor theory of value — I promise this is not a joke. This sci-fi action film explores class conflict and exploitation in a dystopian future set between the proletarian inner city of New York and the ultra-elite fortress of Greenwich, Connecticut. I cannot imagine how this film ever got made or why it is not more widely known.

We Live in Public (2009), Ondi Timoner

Tech entrepruener of the dot com era, Josh Harris, is a visionary artist who creates the most perverse piece of performance art / social experiment of the Y2K period. Hundreds of participants are locked inside an underground bunker where every moment of their lives is broadcast on video as a form of proto-social media. Its a true story about the madness of online life and an important historical document...