The Maribor Uprisings | Maple Razsa

Take part and reflect on how uprisings start and sustain through the experimental, interactive, audience-led documentary The Maribor Uprisings. 

In the once prosperous industrial city of Maribor, Slovenia, anger over political corruption became an unruly revolt. In The Maribor Uprisings — part film, part conversation, and part interactive experiment — you are invited to participate in the protests online. Dramatic frontline footage from a video activist collective places you in Maribor as crowds surround and ransack City Hall under a hailstorm of tear gas canisters. As an online viewer, you must decide collectively with your fellow audience member which cameras you will follow and therefore how the screening will unfold.

The Maribor Uprisings takes up urgent questions raised by these events, and by uprisings elsewhere, from the Arab Spring, through Paris, to Black Lives Matter. What sparks such popular outrage? How are participants swept up in—and then changed by—confrontations with police? Could something like this happen in your city? Engage in these questions with us through this unusual and participatory online event.

Devices with microphones and/or web cams enabled are required for this experience.

How it Works:

• The Maribor Uprisings is facilitated live online via Zoom by director/writer/producer Maple Razsa.
• The event will begin with a brief orientation to the discussion and decision-making practices to be used during this interactive online film experience.
• Throughout the film, audience members will interact with the filmmaker and each other to decide what steps to take next at certain points, ultimately deciding what part of the documentary they will see next.
• Following the screening, Maple Razsa will discuss the film with audience members in a Q&A.

“The film asks us, the audience, to imagine ourselves as members of a filmmaking collective that is documenting and participating in the demonstrations.” — POV Magazine

“In an age where protest footage is live streamed and instant on social media, the filmmakers have managed to take footage of demonstrations from 2012 and make it feel as if you are experiencing it in the actuality of the current moment.” — Rooftop Films

ABOUT MAPLE RAZSA

Maple Razsa is an Associate Professor and Director of Global Studies at Colby College. He is committed to using text, images, and sound to embody the lived experience, as well as the political imaginations of contemporary social movements. Trained as a filmmaker and anthropologist at Harvard University, Maple has conducted fieldwork with alter-globalization protesters, anarchist punk squatters, migrant-labor organizers, video activists, and, most recently, opponents and transgressors of the European border regime. His films—including The Maribor Uprisings, Occupation: A Film About the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In, and Bastards of Utopia—have shown in festivals around the world, including CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and DOK Leipzig. The Society for Visual Anthropology named Uprisings the Best Feature Film of 2017. Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism (Indiana University Press, 2015), the written companion to the film of the same title, won the William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology. Maple has held fellowships from IREX, NSF, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, Fulbright, and Truman Foundations. His current research project is Insurgent Mobilities (in collaboration with Nadia El-Shaarawi), an ethnography of refugee and activist struggles to enact freedom of movement in Europe.