Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--AMI Faculty Spotlight-"Speculation Nation" w/ filmmakers Bill Brown & Sabine Gruffat

Friday, February 19, 2016 - 2:00pm to 3:45pm
Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--AMI Faculty Spotlight-"Speculation Nation" w/ filmmakers Bill Brown & Sabine Gruffat

Film Screening:

Speculation Nation

(Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, 2014, 74 min, USA/Spain, in English, Color, DVD) 

-- Q&A w/ filmmakers Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat!

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 battered Spain. Over a quarter of the population lost their jobs, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. The constitutional guarantee for housing that has been a cornerstone of Spain following the death of Francisco Franco has been shaken by a combination of greedy real estate speculators, predatory banks, corrupt public officials, and a global financial catastrophe.

In this impressionistic documentary film, Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat travel across Spain to document the consequences of the housing crisis. What they find are Spanish citizens, inspired by the politics of The 15M Movement and Occupy Wall Street, who are mobilizing, collectivizing, and fighting for their right for a decent place to live.

Along the way, the filmmakers visit young mothers and their families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites that have sprung up in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in Utopian living.

Speculation Nation examines the ideologies that separate housing from home, and real estate speculation from speculations about a better way to live.

-- Winner of Best Documentary Award in Ann Arbor Film Festival (2015)! 

Speculation Nation is interested in rendering political crisis not only as a wasteland but also a catalyst for social action. In depicting protest camps, demonstrations and the occupation of unused apartments and the caves overlooking Granada, the film’s title picks up a secondary meaning inflected by the determination of ordinary citizens to think outside the box.” --Max Goldberg, Fandor

 

 

 

About the filmmakers:

 

 

 

Bill Brown is a writer and filmmaker living in North Carolina where he is a lecturing fellow in the Arts of the Moving Image Program at Duke University. He received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In his work, Bill is interested in landscapes as markers of our memories, dreams, and desires.

 

 

Bill’s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Viennale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and a Rockefeller Fellowship.

 

 

 

Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist and filmmaker living and working in North Carolina. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

 

 

Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and Migrating Forms in New York. Her feature film I Have Always Been A Dreamer has screened internationally including at the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. 

 

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), with support from the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS).

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