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Chums from Across the Void

Jim Finn

2015 00:17:30 United StatesEnglishColorStereoDV video
Tags:
Activism , Labor , Philosophy , Politics , State, The

Description

Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In this third Inner Trotsky Child video, narrator Lois Severin— a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife—attempts to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self-help scene. Like the Christian fundamentalist activists in the 1970’s who prepared the way for the Reagan Revolution, the Inner Trotsky Child movement was a way to cope with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism and to create a 21st Century revolution of the mind.

 
Written/Directed by Jim Finn
Cinematography by Butcher Walsh
Sound Design by Jesse Stiles & Kristian Tchetchko
Music by Colleen Burke & Chris Skinner
Starring: Lois Severin, Isabella Pinheiro & James Mazza

 

About Jim Finn

"Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times said Jim Finn's films "often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His award-winning movies have been called "Utopian comedies" and "trompe l'oeil films". The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques.

He has been making films, videos, revolutionary needlepoint pillows and photographs for over a decade. His first feature film Interkosmos was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism" by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice's Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea, his film about a North Korean art residency, "brilliant" and said all three films "upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an 'experimental film' actually is."

He is featured in a 2010 Phaidon Press book called Take 100—The Future of Film: 100 New Directors. He was born in St. Louis and teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.