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Film: Bastards of Utopia, directed by Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez Waterville, ME: EnMasse Films, 2010, 56 min.
Bastards of Utopia is the story of three young Croatian anarchists (Fistra, Dado and Jelena) struggling to change the world amid the aftershocks of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bloody wars in the former Yugoslavia. Based on a decade of field work by Harvard-trained anthropologist Maple Razsa and co-director Pacho Velez, the film accurately documents an important period in the history of the Croatian anarchist movement, carefully places warm personal stories in relation to global anti- capitalist struggles, and astutely explores important universal questions. Classified as a documentary educational resource, the film is well suited for courses in subjects ranging from gender, anti-globalisation and social movements to ethnography and anthropology.
Anarchists are usually depicted as aggressive, masked militants who mind- lessly cause trouble and destroy property. In contrast, Bastards of Utopia provides a more rounded insight into anarchists' everyday lives and activism, thus providing a balance between the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the local and the global, the documentary and the critical. The film is organised around a number of central episodes. A smooth story-line provides an excellent background for presenting the best features of the film: small, often brilliant...