The Common Place Social Centre in Leeds has relaunched with an incredible 10 days of radical films, talks gigs and art. Called The Revolution will be Televised, the festival is also the main political fringe of the Leeds International Film Festival. Hundreds of people have passed through the building, a former disused factory in the yuppified Calls district of Leeds city centre .
[Over 100 people attend First Day] [Newsire Details and Programme] Download Programme (RTF format)
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Common Place front
The Common Place cafe
The film festival programme has two very distinct halves. From 4-8 November, The Common Place is showing political films selected by LIFF; after that, the Common Place cinema collective takes over. Each day has a special theme: Czech surrealism; !America Latina Vive!; Autonomia (Italian autonomy); Precarity Planet; and Fire in our hearts: Stories of anti capitalist resistance.
Talks include: a history of Czech Surrealism by Leeds Surrealist Group (9 Nov); an update on the Zapatista struggle (10 Nov); growing up in the radical Italian seventies, by Massimo DeAngelis of The Commoner (11 Nov); update from France 'Les Banlieues on Fire' by French writer and activist, Naima Bouteldja (11, 12 Nov); 'The Trouble with Music' by Matt Callahan, musician, composer, producer, author and community activist from San Francisco (12 Nov); and ‘Making Poverty History or the New Scramble for Africa?’ with exiled Pan-African freedom fighter, Kofi Mawuli Klu of the African Liberation Suport Campaign Network (ALISC) (13 Nov).
There are also two political art exhibitions being showecased at the social centre: the annual Art Not Oil exhibition that coincides with protests against BP’s sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery awards; and multimedia work about the ongoing struggle in Western Sahara, featuring installations on landmine victims, refugees and disappeared activists.
The Common Place began as an idea back in April 2004 when Leeds ARC (Action for Radical Change) initiated a gathering of interested people in Leeds about the possibility of having a a rented social centre as part of the Dissent! mobilisation towards the 2005 G8 in Gleneagles, Scotland.
For the past two months, The Common Place has been closed to the public but is now up and running again with a fully-functioning cinema, gig space, meeting room and vegan Internet cafe.
The aim of The Common Place is "to create an accessible, self-managed and non-hierarchical space in the city in which together people can recover those things being eroded by the market society: a sense of community and solidarity, affordable food and entertainment, a non-commercial place to relax, talk, meet people or find information on political campaigns, issues and actions".
The social centre is now ready to grow as a radical laboratory of political activism in Leeds.
