Belly of the Beast
‘A generation is telling us their world is dystopian’, Dana Coester says at one point in her new documentary, Raised by Wolves. They do it through their memes and online pre-occupations, their jokes about mass shootings and sometimes their political choices. Her film explores the ways in which the world of so many rural youth – particularly boys and young men – make them susceptible to digital mis/disinformation and domestic violent extremism. ‘We have to recognize this as the battle for a generation that it is’, she says.
Kopkind’s second public Movie Night of the season, on Sunday, August 3, will commence with a potluck cookout at 5:30 pm on the lawn at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford. Bring a covered dish! After the meal, we will have the screening in the Organ Barn. Dana will be on hand for discussion.
Set in Appalachia, where Dana grew up and now works as a journalist, a community mediamaker and professor of media arts, Raised by Wolves is part personal narrative, part investigation into far-right extremism in social media and online gaming spaces, part meditation on rural shame – all against the backdrop of an opioid-traumatized, postindustrial landscape of longstanding exploitation and poverty.
Documenting the vulnerability of youth and the escalation of violence in America as it unfolds in real time, and close to home, Coester has observed, “Shame is an essential ingredient for manipulation. In our region, young people know where they sit in relation to power structures in the rest of the world, but shame is not something they bring to that. Shame is a shadow that the media and the rest of the world casts on them.” Power, or the illusion of it, is what the right and its glorification of violence dangle. Abandonment provides a fertile environment.
We chose to show this film not only because we have the good fortune to have Dana with us for the week as a mentor, along with Phoenix-based playwright and political/cultural journalist James Garcia, but also because the violence system, which is increasingly the chief function of the state, is a many-headed hydra. How systemic violence works as both an exploiter of and enticement for poor rural youth is something the left doesn’t talk about enough. So let’s talk about it, because, however else it might be defined, fascism is a politics of death and desire both.
This event kicks off Kopkind’s seminar/retreat session bringing together young jour-nalists and activists from around the country with veterans in the field. The theme this year is One Struggle, One Fight, toward a popular front for our time.
Hope to see you!
Kopkind Colony 