Reclaim the Streets - The Film

This is how we used to do it in the 90's...

Imagine 5000 people being taken across London by underground to a mystery location and then transforming a motorway into a sand pit, a dance floor, a forest. Imagine radical ecologists joining forces with sacked dockers and occupying Liverpool docks. Imagine Trafalgar Square metamorphosed into London's largest rave while under siege from 3000 unhappy riot police. Stop imagining and watc h this film. YOU WILL BE INSPIRED.

May 1995, London, England. A small group of people decide to organise an illegal street party in Camden, a part of the city renowned for its consumerism and incessant traffic. The final location is kept secret, because they know that the state and business will not be amused. Reclaim the Streets! is born, a cocktail of raging love, revolutionary carnival, art and anarchy. Since then the clandestine street parties have erupted all over the world. From Hull to Sydney, Lyon to Tel Aviv, Vancouver to Valencia, people are taking back their streets. And this is only the beginning.

This film, a 2012 re-edit of the original, made from over a hundred hours of footage from 13 film-makers, and brought up to date with a recent expose of cop infiltration, tells the story of reclaim the Streets from its origins in London to the Global Street Party in May 1998 when 30 cities simultaneously joined in the fun.

'Ultimately it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.'

Chumbawamba - Well Done, Now Sod Off!

 

A documentary about the band Chumbawamba, from their beginnings in an anarchist UK squat in the early 80s to their mainstream success and beyond.

Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog is a 1997 American political satire black comedy film produced and directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.

The film centers on a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. The screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet was loosely adapted from Larry Beinhart's 1993 novel, American Hero.

Wag the Dog was released one month before the outbreak of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality. The comparison was also made in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq during Clinton's impeachment trial over the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. It was made again in the spring of 1999 when the administration intervened in the Kosovo War and initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which coincidentally bordered Albania and contained ethnic Albanians.

The film grossed $64.3 million on a $15 million budget and was well received by critics, who praised the direction, performances, themes, and humor. Hoffman received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance and screenwriters David Mamet and Hilary Henkin were both nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.