From California to Tehran, this year has been about the films that resist
Films such as One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and It Was Just An Accident celebrate the importance of fighting back against oppressive forcesOn 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil became the first among several college campus pro-Palestinian protesters to be detained by ICE. He was held for three months, missing the birth of his first child, by an administration that smeared his opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as cheerleading for terrorism, while abusing immigration policy to silence him.At the movies this year, I was repeatedly reminded of Khalil, and others who have seen their altruistic activism reframed as violent threats that need to be snuffed out, in characters whose plights followed similar tracts. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba’s attempts to expose the lies told in Oz are twisted into death threats. In Superman, Kal-El is investigated for being a foreign agent when he defends a community suffering under violent US-backed occupation. Even in Zootopia 2, a bunny cop is framed for attempted murder because she is exposing an attempt to eradicate a marginalized population from their lands and erase their history. Continue reading… More
