As part of 21c’s ongoing commitment to working with the local arts community to provide cultural programming that is free and open to the public, 21c Lexington invites you to our new monthly film series in partnership with the Lexington Film League. This month’s screening features a series of films by Jim Finn, including Interkosmos and Chums from Across the Void.

Interkosmos (70 min, 2006)
“Jim Finn’s Interkosmos, a retro gust of Communist utopianism, is set to open the New York Underground Film Festival on March 8. A cosmonaut romance set aboard a 1970s East German space mission to colonize the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Interkosmos weaves together lovingly faked archival footage, charmingly undermotivated musical numbers, propagandistic maxims (“Capitalism is like a kindergarten of boneless children”), stop-motion animation (of a suitably crude GDR-era level), a Teutonic (and vaguely Herzogian) voiceover, and a superb garage-y Kraut-rock score (by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke). Finn’s deadpan is immaculately bone-dry, and his antiquarian fastidiousness is worthy of Guy Maddin.” – Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

Chums from Across the Void (17:30, 2015)
Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In this third Inner Trotsky Child video, narrator Lois Severin—a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife—attempts to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self-help scene. Like the Christian fundamentalist activists in the 1970’s who prepared the way for the Reagan Revolution, the Inner Trotsky Child movement was a way to cope with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism and to create a 21st-Century revolution of the mind.

About Jim Finn
“Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art,” The New York Times said Jim Finn’s films “often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe.” His award-winning movies have been called “Utopian comedies” and “trompe l’oeil films”. Critic J. Hoberman calls Jim Finn “the solitary vanguard of post-Communist Communist cinema”. The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques. His first feature film Interkosmos was called “a retro gust of communist utopianism” by the Village Voice and “charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres” by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice’s Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea, his film about a North Korean art residency, “brilliant” and said all three films “upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an ‘experimental film’ actually is.” He is featured in a 2010 Phaidon Press book called Take 100—The Future of Film: 100 New Directors. Most recently he is immersed in the Inner Trotsky Child video series which have premiered each year at the New York Film Festival. He was born in St. Louis and teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

About the Lexington Film League Showcase
The Lexington Film League Showcase at 21c Museum Hotel Lexington will present monthly programs that reflect the richness and diversity of contemporary film and video practice in the region and the world. The programs will include new works made by young artists, important works made by living artists, and historical works made by marginalized artists. The programs will include works made in different media, including single-channel films and videos, as well as performances. The programs will also include works that reference different genres, including abstract, non-narrative, documentary, and fictional works. The primary focus of the Showcase will be to introduce Lexington audiences to important film and video works that are not currently available in the area. The ultimate goal of the Showcase is to promote Lexington and 21c as a venue for artistic film and video work.

> Learn more about the Lexington Film League
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