Michael Chanan's documentary on recent student protests in the UK
Don’t miss this screening of a video diary about the movement against government spending cuts in the universities and beyond - with students, activists and citizens of the real big society. The film will be introduced by director Michael Chanan, and the screening will be followed by a panel discussion and Q & A.
Wholeheartedly celebrating the protest movement against government-imposed austerity, Chronicle of Protest presents the discussion, debate and arguments which have come together in open dialogue within the movement, without preferring one position over another, but trying to make sense of the collective clamour, in opposition to the disinformation of the mainstream media.

The mainstream media come under criticism from the start, exposed by the new flux of the internet’s social media, which have become a parallel domain of communication through which the politically unorganised can discover each other, communicate, and organise with great rapidity. This film belongs to this alternative circuit, since it takes the form of a reworking of a series of video blogs originally posted on the New Statesman web site. As the Brazilian film critic José Carlos Avellar put it another context, the camera is an actor within the reality which it films, and that reality is the co-author of the film.

One of the things it inevitably shows in consequence is the reclamation of public space through occupations, street protests, marches and rallies, as the proper place for the expression of popular political demands, precisely because the popular voice is never heard in the mediated public sphere directly but always filtered by the editorial stance. In this film, by contrast, the aim is to hand the word over to the range of individual and collective voices which are now ringing in the politicians’ ears at every turn, clamouring for
social justice.

cubecinema.com