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What Is Democracy? Film Screening and Director Q&A

December 7, 2019 @ 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

What is Democracy? Film poster.

Free to the public.

Coming at a moment of profound political and social crisis, What Is Democracy? reflects on a word we too often take for granted.

Director Astra Taylor’s idiosyncratic, philosophical journey spans millennia and continents: from ancient Athens’ groundbreaking experiment in self-government to capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy; from modern-day Greece grappling with financial collapse and a mounting refugee crisis to the United States reckoning with its racist past and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Featuring a diverse cast—including celebrated theorists, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers, and former prime ministers—this urgent film connects the past and the present, the emotional and the intellectual, the personal and the political, in order to provoke and inspire. If we want to live in democracy, we must first ask what the word even means.

After the screening this 107minute film, we will have the opportunity to discuss it with the filmmaker, Astra Taylor.

Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director of the philosophical documentaries What Is Democracy?Examined Life and Zizek!; the author of the American Book Award winner The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age; and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She has written for The New York TimesThe London Review of BooksThe GuardianThe WalrusThe Bafflern+1, and many other outlets. She is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and a former touring member of the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Her new book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, will be out from Metropolitan Books in early 2019.

From the director of Zizek! and Examined Life!

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? opened in theaters on January 16, 2019.

Details

Date:
December 7, 2019
Time:
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Category:
Event Tags:
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Venue

CJAC’s McKiernan Library
836 Prior Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55104 United States
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