Anarchism is a tender thing

Watchlist for the softhearted radical

— written by Veronika Kim, from her handbook on artistic and cinematic resistance

We have cried,—and the Gods are silent;
We have trusted,—and been betrayed;
We have loved,—and the fruit was ashes;
We have given,—the gift was weighed.

We know that the heavens are empty,
That friendship and love are names;
That truth is an ashen cinder,
The end of life’s burnt-out flames.

Vainly and long have we waited,
Through the night of the human roar,
For a single song on the harp of Hope,
Or a ray from a day-lit shore.

— Excerpt from The Toast of Despair by Voltairine de Cleyre;
anarchist, freethinker, feminist, writer.

I’ve been thinking about the first issue of the Daughter periodical. Anarchism. And, honestly, I feel like it is an almost melancholic state of mind. Of course, the first images that would probably come to your mind would be chaos, destruction, communism, or Guy Fawkes masks, but it is only one, aesthetic-ized side of the coin. You know, no one really comes into anarchism from a good place. No, it’s almost like the last beacon of light for a better future, not just for yourself but for those who you share this Earth with, too. And when it comes to art, it’s almost like artistic resistance to oppression is taking one for the team. It’s understanding that this ‘unconventional’ story might get you exiled, deported, hate-crimed, or even imprisoned, but on the other hand, what’s there to lose?

Here’s a small curation of films about political resistance, visibility, anarchism, and people whose dignity and values are higher than anything else. Or, a handbook on how to resist when you have a camera, a piece of paper, a pen, and wish to change something.

Salomé (1923)
     directed by Charles Bryant & Alla Nazimova
     originally written by Oscar Wilde

Salomé is actually the very reason why this listicle exists. I was sitting in my drama class, and the professor brought up Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé and the way the play was considered a rebellion at the time. It was resisting Victorian rigid social norms. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and so this listicle was born.

Salomé is Wilde’s retelling of the Biblical tale of the beheading of John the Baptist. In the Bible, the story focuses on the martyrdom of John, who dies from Herodias’s animalistic wish to get rid of him for he condemned her new marriage. Wilde’s retelling, however, has more dimensions and is more humane.

Wilde’s entire scholarship is one big farce of Victorian rigidity, but Salomé works on a completely different frequency. Instead of directly creating characters of the ‘blue blood’ to meditate on the hypocrisy of Victorian forced binarism presented in a comedic package that aristocrats ate up, he’s twisting the holy religious story. And that was something that people just couldn’t tolerate.

Instead of Herodias, it is Salomé whose sexual obsession with the prophet results in her destructive desires. Her sexual desire for John is not reciprocated, which catalyzes her demand for his beheading. Not only was she a woman but also horny––a combination that sent Victorians into a coma. Salome’s vivid sexuality was pure horror to Victorian society whose morals revolved around a narrow-minded patriarchal purity culture that had no place for women. Salome’s entire personality was one big act of resistance to Victorian rule, which earned the play a ban on performance in England from its release in 1893 until 1905, 5 years after Wilde’s death.

We can’t see the original play, but the 1923 film version is the closest we have, and it’s pretty impressive.

Mother of Many Children (1977)
     directed by Alanis Obomsawin

“Men and women had an equal basis. And the clans, the family structure came through the women––that’s where you recognize two people were related. That’s where you receive all your instruction, the traditions of your own people, the histories, religious training, arts, music. That all came through your grandmothers.”

If there’s just one film out of this entire list that I would beg you on my knees to watch, it’d be this one. Honestly, the biggest gem of a film (it has 220 views on Letterboxd).

The feature documents the lives of girls, women, and mothers within Indigenous cultures and the essence of a matriarchy that, with the waves of colonization, time after time was threatened to get erased. Obomsawin captures the most precious stages of girlhood, from birth to childhood, puberty and the first menstrual cycle, young adulthood, motherhood, and old age. Recollecting the notions of Indigenous womanhood bit by bit, some heart-warming, some gut-wrenching, the film reveals how native women never failed to proudly carry their culture, instill cultural pride in their children, and pass on their stories to new generations.

A few days ago, I came across The Comment Section podcast’s episode with Alok Vaid-Menon, and they said that gender is a racial construct. Before colonization, Indigenous cultures did not adhere to gender binary, and it was something forcefully imposed on them by white, Christian colonizers.

“When we’re saying ‘look like a woman’ or ‘act like a woman,’ what we are saying is ‘look or act like a white woman,’ and policing women of color into that.”

And I think Obomsawin’s documentary really delves deep into this concept. The film does not tackle the notion of native transness and two-spiritedness; however, it does explore how women resisted white binarism that was used as a way of cultural extinction. It’s kind of crazy that I saw the podcast clip literally an hour before watching the film, but do check out the podcast episode, the points the hosts make are jaw-dropping.

This is Not A Film (2011)
     directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi

This film might be the most traditionally and conventionally anarchist among all. The documentary follows the life of a political activist under a home arrest he was put under for his opposition to the rigged election. The feature was filmed on an iPhone and smuggled on a USB hidden in a cake to the Cannes Film Festival.

2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidential election in a “landslide,” causing confusion among the citizens. His presidency promised an advancement of large-scale production of nuclear fuel and economic collapse, and moreover, the votes were counted too quickly (LOOKING MIGHTY FAMILIAR). His win made millions of people go to the streets and protest. As a result, the opposition leader was placed under house arrest that started on February 14th, 2011, and ended on April 20th, 2025, making it 14 years, 2 months, and 6 days of informal confinement for political resistance. Activists and reformist politicians were imprisoned, students and professors were expelled and fired from universities for protesting, and independent newspapers were shut down.

Jafar Panahi––the center of the film––was one of the activists who had to learn the reality of governmental censorship the hard way. His outspoken criticism of Ahmadinejad’s presidency earned him 6 years in prison and a 20-year ban on any kind of filmmaking, screenwriting, interviews, and leaving Iran. The film is inherently anarchist by all unwritten cannons. It not only shows the cruel reality of rigged elections, but also gives a beacon of light that resistance will always arise.

Nitrate Kisses (1992)
     directed by Barbara Hammer

“So I made a film about history. Why are some people left out of history? Who makes history? And it is particularly concerned about gay and lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, asexual history. Heterosexuality was the norm for recorded history, so I made a large film —my first large film of 77 minutes— Nitrate Kisses.”

— Barbara Hammer for the interview with MOMA

Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses is a recollection of the lost queer history. The feature follows the daily lives of lesbian and gay couples, shielded from the world full of hatred and in the arms of their lovers. The film has such raw footage of love that you almost forget that the 90s were not the safest time for the LGBTQ+ community. On top of the rising homophobia, the erasure of the queer community from all history records creates another toll on self-acceptance.

But Hammer’s couples laugh, smile, kiss, have sex, and are happy. Despite numerous attempts to erase LGBTQ+ people from the face of the earth, she recollects this beautiful notion of love by hand, proving every heteronormativity propagandist otherwise. She proves that queer people always have and always will exist.

I was looking through the reviews on Letterboxd as one does, and one person said “It feels good to be visible.” And that to me is the very essence of anarchism––maybe creating a new society altogether is not possible, but if going against rigid conventions will make at least one person feel seen and heard, then maybe we’re headed in the right direction.

One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1977)
     directed by Agnès Varda

“I tried to be a joyful feminist, but I was very angry.”

— Agnès Varda

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t follows the lives of two friends, Suzanne and Pauline (Pomme), as they navigate their lives as women and feminists in a male-dominated world. The two women spend the majority of the film apart, but they keep reuniting because of their shared striving for women’s right to choose to be mothers. The film is essentially a meditation on women’s bodily autonomy and motherhood experience, and how those two concepts coexist. Suzanne is a mother of two, and she got an abortion; Pomme, later on in the film, too becomes a mother after having gotten an abortion.

The conversation about abortion is often too polarized. One end is staunchly child-free, stating motherhood is a patriarchal institution that all women are to abandon; the other end—motherhood is the only way of self-fulfillment for women, followed by the all too familiar ‘life-starts-at-conception' line of argumentation. It seems like there’s no in-between. But Varda somehow miraculously crafts this juxtaposition of abortion and motherhood, which is a woman’s bodily agency.

The issue today would be considered revolutionary for daring to speak about abortion in such a humanizing light, awakening all sorts of reactions, but I can only imagine how almost 50 years ago the disparity was even higher. Varda’s scream for women’s rights to choose whether they want to be mothers or not was, still is, a voice of reason in a cacophony of hypocrisy.

It’s overall an amazing film about feminism and women’s resilience presented to you in a package with intimate notions of female friendships and motherhood—what’s not to like?

Lingua Franca (2019)
     directed by Isabel Sandoval

The film follows the life of an undocumented Filipina trans woman as she falls in love in Brooklyn (Tr*mp’s biggest nightmare). Olivia—Isabel Sandoval’s character—works as a caretaker of an old Russian-Jewish woman. She lives in a constant fear of her life and safety being threatened on multiple accounts: she’s a transgender working-class woman of color, and she’s an undocumented immigrant in a country that explicitly states no one is welcome unless they’re white and rich. The kind of experience Olivia lives through is not something just anyone can imagine and put themselves into her shoes, but Sandoval’s storytelling is so tender and turbulent that it just makes you live every moment with her character.

It almost seems like the very fabric of the film is anarchism. In the rise of far-right conservatism and descent to fascism, a film about the most targeted social group —an undocumented, transgender woman of colour— is hope. It argues every convection some people fear to let go, but at the same time makes so many people feel visible which is, once again, all that really matters.

You know how Lin Manuel Miranda wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Hamilton? Well, Isabel Sandoval wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in Lingua Franca. Isabel Sandoval is an insanely talented filmmaker. The way she builds mise-en-scène, crafts cinematography, writes characters, develops the narrative, and edits the film is just beautiful. I wish more people saw the film, especially at this point in time.

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