Revolution Selfie expands the horizons of documentary storytelling while broadening our understanding about the lesser-known fronts in the global “War on Terror.” Filmmaker Steven De Castro paints a portrait of a 48 year-old Maoist guerrilla army in the Philippine hinterlands known as the New People's Army.  But rather than simply presenting interviews and images in a traditional journalistic manner, this film weaves fantasy elements and web-based camera techniques into the documentary form to disrupt our entire matrix of widely held beliefs underpinning the discussion of terrorism, poverty, and the motivations of the warriors who fight in a peasant revolution.

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The film is narrated and shot almost entirely from first person point of view, using a small GoPro action camera that the filmmaker is wearing.  Because of this unique shooting angle, the film succeeds at times in giving the audience an almost video game-like immersion in the narrator's experience.  

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"Revolution Selfie tells its story, not through interviews and b-roll, but through the creation of the lived experience of being there.  The flm borrows augmented reality techniques from video games and youtube videos, as if to say that the visual language of mainstream documentaries is incapable of communicating the struggles of those who live beyond the margins of globalism and technology – the world's downtrodden agrarian poor."-Natalie Selincourt, Wish Machinery

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dir. Steven De Castro, 2018,
United States/Netherlands/Phillippines, digital projection

120 min

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7:30 DOORS
8:00 SCREENING

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Presented in collaboration with Anakbayan L.A. - Filipino youth & students organizing in the National Democratic Movement for the liberation of the Filipino people.