EXILE presents… ‘The Day the Country Died’ at Ottawa Cinema Politica
EXILE hosts tonight’s Ottawa Cinema Politica event!
—————————————————————————–
THE DAY THE COUNTRY DIED: A HISTORY OF ANARCHO PUNK 1980-1984
(UK / 90 minutes / 2007 / English)
“The rise of anarcho punk in the wake of Crass finally saw punk rock
become the movement it always threatened to be in the late Seventies.
Suddenly punk wasn’t about the clothes you wore, the music you played,
it was about what was in your head, what was in your heart. Bands like
Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, Subhumans, The Mob, Zounds, and quite
literally hundreds more, took the sentiments of Crass in myriad musical
directions, but always maintained as their primary motivation a desire
to offer a genuine alternative to the mainstream.
Such purity in purpose was not sustainable forever, of course, and by
the mid-Eighties, anarcho punk had almost become a parody of itself, the
scene having adopted – for the most part – a standardized look, sound
and stance that almost rendered it as redundant as that which it had set
out to overthrow. But, for a few short years back then, anarcho punk was
the most vital, exciting and downright subversive music to ever spring
forth from a loudspeaker, its power and passion a far cry from what is
so often passed off as revolutionary music today. Yet so little has been
done to seriously document that groundbreaking period of the UK
underground, even massive sellers like Crass seemingly swept under the
carpet, out of sight, out of mind, the ‘poor relations’ of the
infinitely safer bands laughably lauded by the media as ‘true punk’.
Until now that is, and the publication of Ian Glasper’s book, “The Day
the Country Died’, which peels away the myths one by one, through
all-new interviews and exhaustive research. This [film], by renowned
maverick filmmaker Roy Wallace (himself one-time vocalist with Belfast
band, Toxic Waste) is the visual companion to that work, concisely
relating the real story of anarcho punk via a wealth of exclusive new
interviews and ultra rare archive footage. Between this [film] and that
book, anarcho punk finally gets a fair hearing, and not before time!”
———————————————————————————–
TIME AND PLACE:
Friday, September 14, 2007
Doors open at 7pm / Film starts at 7:30pm
MacDonald Hall Auditorium (MCD 146),
150 Louis Pasteur Street, University of Ottawa main campus.
Admission: FREE
To join the weekly announcement email list, email: dgr@uottawa.ca