The Spiral Times: Rosa Martinez | BB

With BB

This month the Spiral Times was joined on a park bench in Queens, New York by Rosa Martinez, a film programmer and organiser, for a wide-ranging conversation about the role of film and the archive in political education and their experience with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. This one’s a deep dive on some of our favourite ideological filmmakers, from Elia Suleiman to Peter Watkins to today’s resistance fighters. We dive into navigating the at-once sedative and stimulant qualities of our all-saturating image world, state agents at the DIY screening, the importance of intergenerational encounter, and some first principles for forging community cinema spaces towards action. 
 Later in the show, Rosa shares a detailed account of their experience as a boat co-organiser and translator on the Flotilla, its psychic, bodily, political and emotional impact from sailing to interception, kidnap and violence, reflecting on the complex structures and internal dynamics of high stakes global solidarity actions and the and practical potential of transcending symbolic and humanitarian frames when acting in support of liberation movements.

With song selections from my guest and plentiful clips, this show doubles as guided curriculum of films to find and watch with your friends, including::

  • The Battle of Algiers — Gillo Pontecorvo — 1966

  • Pig Earth — Mike Dibb, w/ John Berger — 1979

  • The Hour of the Furnaces (Hora de los Hornos) — Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino — 1968

  • What Is Hidden Is Greater: The Flood — Al Jazeera documentary — 2025

  • Underground — Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson & Haskell Wexler — 1976

  • Introduction to the End of an Argument — Elia Suleiman & Jayce Salloum — 1990

  • dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y — Johan Grimonprez — 1997

  • HyperNormalisation — Adam Curtis — 2016

  • A Grin Without a Cat — Chris Marker — 1977

  • The Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo) — Luis Ospina & Carlos Mayolo — 1977

  • The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum — Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta — 1975

  • La Commune (Paris, 1871) — Peter Watkins — 2000

  • The Journey — Peter Watkins — 1987

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