An unusually ‘blockbuster’ movie for Freedom Film Club, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, dir. George Miller, 120 mins) is this month’s curated film. Fury Road is a sci-fi action film set in a post-apocalyptic world that explores themes of basic survival and the retention of humanity in the face of …
At a time when global affairs seem to be becoming ever more intimately bound up with all of our lives, the masterful Cold War, from Oscar winning Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, explores the effects of geopolitics on the freedom of human hearts; how music and art transcend circumstance; and the …
How can technology help support better mental health? Instead of building spaces that breed toxic behaviour like trolling and bullying, are there ways to use or design technology that instead encourage the values we want? Has the much vaunted decentralisation of access to information been delivered, and how much has it …
The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015, Dir. Holly Morris, Anne Bogart, 71 mins) is this month’s curated Freedom Film Club film. In the radioactive Dead Zone surrounding Chernobyl’s Reactor a community of old women cling to their ancestral homeland. While their neighbours have long since fled and their husbands gradually died …
Persepolis is this month’s curated Freedom Film Club film The story of this animated film follows a young girl as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, It was written and directed by Satrapi in …
Which narratives and ways of framing the seminal challenge of our age have the best chance of helping us meet that challenge, climate change? What are the psychological factors that make it difficult for us to address these large scale (and long time scale) issues and how can we best …
Malcolm X (1925–1965) was an American human rights activist and Muslim minister who was a hugely important figure in the civil rights movement. Best known for his advocacy for the rights of people of colour, he is the subject of Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed, award winning biopic, which features Denzel …
Democracy Club is a hugely important initiative that has as its mission “An ambitious goal to provide accurate, non-partisan information on every election and candidate in the UK, unbiased and unfiltered” It is a club consisting of a large network of volunteers across the country, with a similar, but smaller, …
How should (and do) current and near-future technology relate to the responsibility of peoples and states to other peoples and states? How can heavily developed countries help developing countries take up the best, and avoid the worst, of the technical means at our disposal? And what should we in the …
This month’s film is 2015’s historical fiction about the epochal struggle for votes for women, Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette. Interestingly, it was apparently the first film to be filmed in the Houses of Parliament. Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of perhaps the most famous real-life suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, has said: What I love about the …
