Black Box Presents: Sunset Seduction

South Philly Autonomous Cinema is pleased to present, in collaboration with Vox Populi’s Black Box Presents Program, Sunset Seduction by Charles de Agustin on Thursday, March 6, 2025. Doors at 7:30pm, screening at 8pm, followed by an extended audience discussion with the artist and organizers.

Sunset Seduction is an evolving project centered on a 45-minute film alongside site-specific contracts and discussions, starring a liberal philanthropist who yearns for his next fling with radical politics. Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the film unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. 

Nonprofit organizations—even those driven by equity, decolonization, abolition—are tied to an unsustainable infrastructure that consistently creeps toward establishment liberalism. Sunset Seduction revitalizes the spirit of INCITE’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (2007); emphasizes collective grassroots action in the popular imagination, which may include siphoning and subverting philanthropic resources, far beyond electoral politics and do-gooder grantmaking; and works toward a “more radical form of complicity” (Moten & Harney).

With influence from Faye R. Gleisser’s notion of “risk work” and histories of the contract as artistic intervention, a scene in the film explains that the artist will work with each exhibiting institution’s staff to enact a “genuine and disruptive act of treason against the socioeconomic interests of the ruling class” in order for the work to be presented, intending to materialize the particular responsibilities of cultural workers in the global north.

Charles de Agustin is an artist based in Brooklyn who primarily makes films. Rooted in essay and diary cinema alongside an expanded practice in writing and performance, his work considers ideas around critique, access, intimacy, and capture, often in the context of cultural institutions. Solo and group presentations 2021-25 include Alternative Film/Video (Belgrade), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan), Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), Kassel Dokfest (Germany), Maysles Documentary Center (New York), Revolutions per Minute Festival (Boston), Saigon Experimental Film Festival (Vietnam), South London Gallery (England), Spectacle (Brooklyn), XINEMA (Vancouver), among others. de Agustin has a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Oxford. He has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Elephant Trust. His artistic practice is mutually informed by experiences as an organizer, educator, and programmer.

South Philly Autonomous Cinema is a collectively-run organization screening leftist, queer, and rare films in South Philadelphia.

About Black Box Presents

Made possible by the William Penn Foundation, is a yearlong series transforming our Black Box Performance Theater into a platform for 12 community arts organizations, each curating their own monthly event. This initiative amplifies experimental music, dance, film, and spoken word while ensuring free, accessible programming that strengthens Philadelphia’s creative networks.

About William Penn Foundation
The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, is committed to expanding access to resources and opportunities that promote a more vital and just city and region for all. We do this through funding programs in the Philadelphia region in arts and culture, children and families, democracy and civic initiatives, environment and public space, and workforce training and services. Learn more at www.williampennfoundation.org.

Host or Publisher Vox Populi