Film Screenings / Programs / Series
COMBAT BREATHING
October 1 – October 8
“Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics” is a multisite platform, spanning film screenings, critical discussions, and focused workshops, that unfolds throughout October 2026. Responding to the current geopolitical juncture, it asks what roles artistic and intellectual production, circulation, and collective study might assume amid intensifying imperial violence and renewed global mobilizations. In an era when audiovisual technologies are increasingly deployed to discipline collective imagination and stabilize statist and capitalist power, the symposium responds by foregrounding insurgent poetics, militant pedagogy, and autonomous infrastructures of media production, distribution, and reception.
Drawing on the histories of Third Cinema and other anti-colonial and anti-imperial cultural movements, the film program at Anthology Film Archives considers how these traditions persist, mutate, and reemerge in the present. Organized into six chapters comprising twenty-seven films, “Combat Breathing” explores the convergences of aesthetics and politics: how they take form on screen; where the militant image resides today; how images index and reveal infrastructures of labor; the pervasiveness of and resistance to carceral logics; the strategic reappropriations of imaging technologies; and film’s capacity to institute and reorganize desire.
Curated by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia.
Special thanks to all the filmmakers, and to Miguel Abreu Gallery; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Greene Naftali; Cali Guisto (Frameline); Bob Hunter (Icarus Films); Lisson Gallery; Kristin MacDonough & Emily Martin (VDB); Roselly Torres (Third World Newsreel); Andrew Weiner (New York University); and Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive).
Upcoming Screenings
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COMBAT BREATHING: INSURGENT POIESIS
October 1 at 6:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: THE TIME BENEATH THE CONCRETE
October 2 at 7:00 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 1: CINÉ-GUERRILLAS
October 3 at 4:00 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 2: TESTAMENT
October 3 at 6:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 3: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES
October 3 at 8:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 1
October 4 at 4:15 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 2: AMUSSU
October 4 at 6:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: LABORING IMAGES, PART 1
October 6 at 6:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: LABORING IMAGES, PART 2: SICILIA!
October 6 at 8:15 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: READ MY DESIRE, PART 1
October 8 at 6:30 PM
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COMBAT BREATHING: READ MY DESIRE, PART 2
October 8 at 8:15 PM
