Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $10

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We kick off our three-day workshop Post Militant Cinema: Documenting in the Wake of Struggle with a screening and conversation that extends our inquiry around post-militant cinema—how the images created in the wake of struggle echo, instruct, and complicate the present. The evening features three films mapping intergenerational repair, cartographies of revolt, and figures left in history’s undertow.

Ash Goh Hua’s I’m Free Now, You Are Free centers repair and return, tracing how love and organizing can reassemble a life torn apart by state violence while Michael McCanne’s A Minor Figure lingers with those who slip the official record, testing whether traces can be made legible without closing down their ambiguity. Lastly, our workshop lead for the weekend, Nate Lavey’s Very Gentle Work maps a city through its fugitive histories, asking what an archive of revolt looks like when routed through streets and memory rather than institutions.

Taken together, these films probe how images carry struggle forward—through repair, cartography, and the ethics of observation—and set the stage for the workshop’s inquiries to continue to unspool.

Join us to kick off the conversation and catch these talented filmmakers work and in conversation following the program. 

Program

I’m Free Now, You Are Free by Ash Goh Hua

15 mins, 2020

I’m Free Now, You Are Free is a short documentary about the reunion and repair between Mike Africa Jr and his mother Debbie—a formerly incarcerated political prisoner of the MOVE9. In 1978, Debbie, then 8 months pregnant, and many other MOVE family members were arrested after an attack by the Philadelphia Police Department; born in a prison cell, Mike Africa Jr. spent just three days with his mother before guards wrenched him away, and they spent the next 40 years struggling for freedom and for each other.

A Minor Figure by Michael McCanne, Jamie Weiss

16 mins, 2021

A Minor Figure is a 2021 experimental short (USA, Spain) that explores the story of a Japanese man, who snuck into the US under a false passport in 1988 and was arrested several months later in New Jersey with three homemade bombs. Mixing elements of documentary and noir, the film searches for traces of the protagonist in his aimless road trip around the eastern United States as he built his bombs and was haunted by memories of a revolution that never arrived.

Very Gentle Work by Nate Lavey

24 mins, 2024

Through a fictional protagonist’s psychogeographic research into militant revenge and Jewish tradition, charting a map of revolutionary violence in New York City, Very Gentle Work connects Sholem Schwarzbard, the Black Liberation Army, FALN and Weather Underground to the ongoing struggle against a proposed police training center near Atlanta, Georgia. It premiered at the 2024 edition of the Festival de Cannes and won the Manoel de Oliveira award at the Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival.

Program Duration: 55 mins

Bios

Nate Lavey is an experimental filmmaker and photographer with a background in documentary and video journalism. He has a longstanding interest in political militancy, landscape and the avant-garde. His recent short film Very Gentle Work premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.

Ash Goh Hua is a Singapore born and raised, New York based filmmaker. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Ash tells personal stories that reveal the inherently embodied politics of relation, society and culture. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Ash is a 2024 Berlinale Talent and a 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient.

Michael McCanne is an interdisciplinary writer whose work has appeared in Art in America, The New Inquiry, Boston Review, Jacobin, and The LA Review of Books. In 2020, he received a grant from the Wave Farm/NYSCA Media Arts Assistance Fund to complete his first film A Minor Figure, a collaboration with Jamie Weiss. The film premiered at Documenta Madrid and screened as part of Curtocircuito International Film Festival, MiradasDoc, and Prismatic Ground.