Mystery Theatre Club in collaboration with Anfield People’s Cinema present – Occupy!
Kitty’s Laundrette 77 Grasmere St, Liverpool L5 6RH
Doors and food from 7pm
Film starts at 7:30pm
Pay What You Can
Free Hot Meal! – Discussion after the Screening!
Join the Mystery Theatre Club for a monthly archived screening of unique, world-class theatre shows. Embrace experimental and contemporary works from exciting theatre makers.
This time they are collaborating with Anfield People’s Cinema and will be presenting Occupy! (1976 ) Pete Postlethwaite, Bill Nighy and Julie Walters, make some of their earliest performances on film in the story of a four-year struggle to set up a worker’s cooperative at a Fisher-Bendix factory in Kirkby. GaelDohany’s polemical and formally radical documentary recounts the passage of industrial dispute through a mixture of interviews, news reports and scenes from a play about the occupation performed by the Liverpool Everyman Theatre.
Also intercut are ‘eye-witness’ reports from similar events in Turin in 1919 and Detroit in 1936. With the use of such fictionalised interviews and its intercutting of material, the film has stylistic echoes of the work of Peter Watkins and Jean-Luc Godard, but rather than making broader political commentary Dohany is focused on the intrigue of this localised struggle. Occupy! was funded by the BFI Production Board during a brief period of mid-1970s political radicalism when the Board also funded films by London Women’s Film Group, Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Collective.