El Pueblo Se Levanta Ayer & Hoy (The People Are Rising Then & Now)

This program will be presented bilingually, in English and Spanish.

Third World Newsreel (TWN) and Pioneer Works are pleased to co-present a screening of El Pueblo Se Levanta (The People Are Rising), an iconic film released in 1971 which captures the compassion and militancy of the Young Lords Party—a group that implemented health, educational and public assistance programs in response to the racial discrimination, deficient community services, poor education and job opportunities for Puerto Ricans in the United States.

El Pueblo Se Levanta will be followed by the screening of Coyolxauhqui and Have You Seen? (both 2017), two short films by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Founded in 2011 in Tehuacán, Colectivo Los Ingrávido—which translates to ‘invisible’—is a political media collective that claims a floating, even spectral presence, embracing the malleability and transportability of the moving image to confront the violence and corruption of contemporary Mexico.

The program will conclude with a discussion centered on activism-focused films both past and present, and the various forms of visual and social media now used in collective organizing. Featured speakers will include El Pueblo Se Levanta filmmakers Iris Morales and Bev Grant; TWN member Allan Siegel; and Natasha Dhillon and Amin Husain from MTL Collective, a collaborative that joins research, aesthetics, organizing and action in practice. The conversation will be moderated by Teresa Basilio Gaztambide, and a member of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos will also join via Zoom.

About Third World Newsreel

Third World Newsreel (TWN) is an alternative media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people of color and social justice issues. It does this through educational distribution, exhibition, production and training. Founded in 1967 as the Newsreel, a radical film collective, it became Third World Newsreel in the seventies.

About the Panelists

Nitasha Dhillon is a writer, artist, educator, and organizer. Along with Amin Husain, she is the founder of MTL Collective, which, in turn, has founded Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), a direct action wing of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition as well as MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place (DTP). DTP is an action-oriented movement that blurs the lines between art, organizing and action around six strands of struggle: Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage worker, de-gentrification, and dismantle patriarchy. Dhillon’s writings have been published in October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Hyperallergic, Dissent Magazine, Creative Time Reports, and Brooklyn Rail, among others. She is a contributing author with Paula Chakravartty to The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by Andrew Ross, and has lectured at major universities including Brown University, Magnum Foundation, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Chicago, SUNY Purchase, University of Colorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Visual Arts.

Bev Grant is a labor and social activist, feminist, singer-songwriter, photographer, filmmaker and 2017 Joe Hill Award winner from the Labor Heritage Foundation for her work as a cultural worker, as well as the 2017 winner of the ASCAP Foundation’s Jay Gorney award for her song “We Were There.” In July 1917, Bev began scanning images from photo negatives she shot as a radical photojournalist in the late 1960s, including some iconic photos of the early radical women’s movement, the Young Lords Party, the Black Panther Party, and many other movement struggles. She has exhibited at OSMOS Gallery in NYC, the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, and is currently featured in a solo exhibition at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, OR and the American Labor Museum in Haledon, NJ. A photographic monograph titled Bev Grant Photography: 1968-1972 was published by OSMOS Books in December 2021. She recently created a documentary film, soon to be released, focusing on her experiences as a member of Third World Newsreel.

Amin Husain’s interests focus on resistance and liberation, movement generated theory and practice. His research and teaching interests span debt and financialization, globalization and political economy, social movements and cultures of resistance, race, class and ethnicity in the media, and postcolonial theory. He is a founding member of Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), direct action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition; a member of Gulf Labor Coalition, a self-organized group of artists, writers, architects, curators, and other cultural workers trying to ensure worker’s rights are protected when art, labor and global capital intersect; a founding member and managing editor of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, a printed theory and strategy magazine of the Occupy movement; a founding member of MTL, a collective that combines aesthetics, research and organizing in its practice; and founding member of NYC Solidarity with Palestine.

Iris Morales is a lifelong activist and organizer for social justice, racial equality, women’s rights, and the decolonization of Puerto Rico. Currently, Morales is the Founding Director and Executive Editor of Red Sugarcane Press, dedicated to publishing works about the Puerto Rican and Latinx Diasporas in the Americas. She has compiled, edited, and published several anthologies, including Voices from Puerto Rico: Post-Hurricane Maria/ Voces desde Puerto Rico: pos-huracan Maria (2019) about climate justice and colonialism, and Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA (2018), a collection of contemporary feminist perspectives. A leading member of The Young Lords, she is the author of Through the Eyes of Rebel Women, The Young Lords: 1969-1976, the first and only account of women members. Morales is also the producer, writer, and co-director of the award-winning documentary, !Palante Siempre Palante! the Young Lords, which was broadcast on national public television in 1996, and continues to introduce this history to new audiences.

Allan Siegel was a cofounder of the original Newsreel film collective (1967) and a member of Third World Newsreel during the 1970s and 1980s. His films include Mississippi Triangle, Mohawk Nation (with a recent revival at the Film Forum), and Lifting the Fog. Siegel has written and spoken extensively on film, teaching in the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He is currently in post production on a film about Malcolm X.

Founded in 2011 in Tehuacan, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a political media collective that claims a floating, even spectral presence, embracing the malleability and transportability of the moving image to confront the violence and corruption of contemporary Mexico. Their decision to operate anonymously, without the burden of the individual name, stems as much from a spirit of collaboration as from necessity, in a country where many journalists have been disappeared or openly murdered. Theirs is a counter-cinema of elegant rage, a poetics of resistance that contests the unpunished M**der of women, the rippling effects of narcocapitalism, and the failures of the state.

About the Moderator

Teresa Basilio Gaztambide is the Network Strategies Director at MediaJustice, a group that works for a media and technology environment that fuels real justice and systemic change. A native of Puerto Rico and a Brooklyn resident for over 20 years, she is an activist, organizer and a filmmaker.

Host or Publisher Pioneer Works