Birmingham Indymedia Cinema Night: An evening of independent documentary, features, shorts and clips.

Zapatista (Big Noise films 1998)

It is New Year's night 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect. To the Mayan Indian communities in the Lacandon Jungle of Southeastern Mexico, NAFTA symbolizes the culmination of over 500 years of exploitation. That night, 2,000 Indian soldiers occupy several cities in the state of Chiapas and declare political and economic independence. They call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Zapatista is the definitve look at the civil war in Mexico. The product of over two years of filming and research, it combines first hand footage with extensive interviews and testimonies from campesinos, rebel leaders, activists and intellectuals working on both sides of the border. Zapatista locates the struggle in a global and historical context, revealing the ways in which Zapatismo grows out of 500 years of indigenous resistance and tracing the connections the Zapatistas have made to movements around the world.

The film will be followed by a discussion facilitated by a local activist who has spent time in Chiapas with the Zapatistas.

Big Noise Tactical is a not-for-profit, all-volunteer collective of media-makers around the world.

Indymedia UK is a network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grass roots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues

Indymedia Argentina, Eye of the Storm Films, 14 mins

"Eye of the Storm - the Crisis in Argentina and the Role of Independent Media at the Center of a Revolution" is a video project which attempts to identify the utility and power of the Independent Media Center (IMC) movement through the specific history of a single local IMC. In particular, this film focuses on the Argentinean Independent Media Center, a network of independent journalists which produces news and facilitates a space for understanding in the center of a neoliberal policy induced national crisis.