We are Making a Film about Mark Fisher Screening

UCU University of Plymouth Branch presents a screening of We are Making a Film about Mark Fisher including a Q and A with the Filmmakers Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor and publisher and award-winning novelist Tariq Goddard. Mark Fisher and Tariq Goddard co-founded Zero Books followed by Repeater to publish works that were "intellectual without being academic, and popular without being populist”. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism was published by Zero Books in 2009.

About the Film

We are Making a Film about Mark Fisher was made with no budget, no studio backing and no institutional permissions. We started on a park bench in Rochford, Essex. A conversation between Tim Burrows and Simon Poulter.
Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, working as Close and Remote, developed the film between 2024-2025. Through instagram (), they enlisted the support of 70 people to make the film.
The film explores solidarity, shared labour and digital connectivity. It enacts what Fisher insisted was still possible – decapitalised cultural production, collective agency among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation. A reminder that DIY doesn’t mean private – it means working together.

In the film nine chapters drift across hauntological terrain – from Felixstowe’s windblown beaches to the CCRU’s delirial hyperstition lab; from K-punk’s midnight blog posts to the echoing chambers of The Vampire Castle; from viral slogans (‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world’) to streets filled with protest and grief. The film deliberately projects beyond 2017 into the Perma-Crisis of 2025/26.
It navigates what Fisher said alongside contemporaneous footage shot by Close and Remote in London. Brexit. Thatcher’s death. The Dump Trump rally. Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ – the phrase itself sounding like something K-punk might have quickly drawn into a post on how Labour abandoned the Left.

The film is not nostalgia. Fisher warned against that. It is an evocation of failed promised futures. And in doing so, it becomes a kind of working group for collective dreaming – a counter to the doom scroll machine of capitalist realism. All about the people who connected in some way.

Where others accelerated towards Mars and living forever (Musk et al), Fisher re-routed the signal through public pedagogy in K-punk and music, transforming these things into a readymade audience. His gift was in making complexity speak in plain language, not in simplifying it but in dignifying the reader – you can understand this. You’re not alone. The one person NME.

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Host or Publisher UCU University of Plymouth