Born in Flames(1983)
dir. Lizzie Borden
What if the revolution forgot the women?
Where to watch: OVID; rent on Amazon, Apple TVLetterboxd ↗
Ten years after a peaceful socialist revolution in the United States, women are still squeezed out of the new order: no jobs, no safety, no say. The film follows several women's networks, among them a women's army, a pirate radio station and a white feminist paper, as they build their own tactics. Lizzie Borden shot it in New York over several years on a tiny budget, mixing documentary style with fiction.
Why it’s here
A feminist sci-fi by a first-time director with almost no money that asks what happens to a revolution after it wins. What's punk is that it was made outside the system it describes. What's pedagogical is how it shows coalitions fracturing over race and class, and how media decides what counts as news. Pairs with Parable of the Sower and Sister Outsider.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- North America
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners & Beth E. Richie
Safety without cages, built by feminists.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
bell hooks
Who gets to count as a woman?
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Hood Feminism
Mikki Kendall
Feminism keeps forgetting the women who need it most.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Women, Race & Class
Angela Y. Davis
Feminism's missing argument. Found here.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit
In the ruins, people built the impossible.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Rachel Held Evans
She followed the rules. The rules lost.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
America (The Book)
Jon Stewart & The Daily Show Writers
A fake civics textbook. More accurate than the real one.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Meet the original gas-lighting pigs.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST