A new experimental documentary feature utilizing the life of Emma Goldman to explore the resurgence of protest in the 21st century. The work is hybrid and prismatic, including contemporary footage, archive and re-enactment to expose the continuing conflicts between labor and property, revolutionary purity and personal freedom.

The film performs a time travel, intercutting moments from Emma’s life with her prescient speeches, weaving industrial era factory labor with computer data centers with Emma’s intimate diaries — to explore human vulnerabilities, compromises and choices. Known as the “most dangerous woman alive,” Emma was also passionate and sexual; beauty/art/humor part of the freedoms for which she was ghting. The film creates a dialogue on individual liberties and anarchism: how we risk and how we are compromised? Questions that have become only more relevant in our current political climate.

This film is the second in Child’s Trilogy of Women and Ideology. Each part asks: How do Ideologies fail women? What do we give up in our struggle to be more than “merely female”? The first in the trilogy, UNBOUND, retells the story of Mary Shelley, examining 19th century Romanticism through “imaginary home movies” shot in Rome.

This second film explores Emma Goldman and Anarchism, shot in New York City, in a series of non-hierarchical fragmented ‘memory’ chapters. The work’s structure is influenced by films as diverse as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension.

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media and writing since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film/video works and 6 books, five of poetry and one of criticism. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to make, in the words of LA Weekly: “brilliant exciting work…a vibrant political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Her films rewrite narrative, while other productions borrow documentary to poetically envision public space. Child’s interest in the social is manifest in her recent work, as is her continuing interest in text on screen.

Winner of the Rome Prize, Radcliffe Institute, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as participating in two Whitney Biennials, (1989, 1997), Child has had numerous retrospectives and solo shows worldwide. Her most recent, ACTS & INTERMISSIONS premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight Feb 2017. Harvard University Cinematheque has created an “Abigail Child Collection” which will preserve and exhibit her art.