A valuable and ultimately sobering look at a student struggle nearing its end. Gives a useful lens to analyze the current student movement for Palestine, especially the contradictions inherent in the category of 'student'. The interviews with the students were both inspiring and frustrating but only because talking to students is frustrating so what can you do
watch: archive.org/details/forest-of-oppression-a-record-of-the-struggle-at-takasaki-city-unive
It’s super well made and I love the vignette style but another review says it best - it’s ultimately a white film on anti blackness.
The choice to move our understanding of prisons away from physical structures and abstract conceptions of “crime and punishment” towards thinking of prisons as a system of relations is beautifully done, but I feel the director was ultimately treating prisons as a spatially distributed economic entity, where the animating force behind prisons is slavery and…
All of Condit's movies make me think they were made by an elementary school music teacher who was found to be a serial killer that forced her victims to act out her deep-seated trauma.
...but in a good way?
Is it bad I care more about figuring out what algorithm produced the images than the existential dread of AI's fast approaching hegemony? Maybe, but at least Hopcroft is proud of me.
