Dok Night | Symbiopsychotaxicinema

18:00 Bar open

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19:00 Vegan Food (€ 10 / cash only)

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20:30 Symbiopsychotaxicinema

Films for Those Who Care

Presented by Jeffrey Badcock

A series of socially engaged movies, screened once a month on Thursdays. Touching on such hot topics as immigration, homelessness, racism, education, radical gender propositions, the pandemic and gentrification, these films not only explore visionary politics, but are also chosen to stir our imagination and creativity. The essence of cinema is the collective experience, and these screenings are aimed at creating intimate communities again in an increasingly hectic and fragmented world.

TRINITY AND BEYOND  1995
Directed by Peter Kuran
93 minutes
In English

Of course the hit summer movie Oppenheimer was a huge production, but in some ways all that hugeness skirted behind many details, was beating around the bush, and wasn’t really dealing with the core issues. In that way it was a bit like “the sound in the fury, in the end signifying nothing”. This documentary was collected together by Peter Kuran, the guy who did all the special effects on the first Star Wars movie. It is considered by many to be the best film dealing with the development and testing of the atomic bomb.

Today people are no longer haunted by the prospect of a nuclear war, even though we are closer to it than ever before in history. Somehow the commodity culture and overwhelming consumerism of the society we live in, with all its bright colors and its rapidly moving messages, prevents people from really focusing on, and understanding the bigger picture. And in that way the idea of a nuclear war seems remote and is trivialized. If we’re not careful, then it won’t only be our minds that are a mess, but our entire existence will be blasted to the wind. This movie intends to change our current mindset, and help us understand what a powerful force of nature a nuclear explosion really is. The immensity of what we see is staggering.

This acclaimed flick dives into the beginnings of the creation of the nuclear bomb, bringing in declassified archival material that wasn’t available until recently. For director Peter Kuran this was not a commercial project, but a personal one. One of his aims was to expose footage that had been hidden for 50 years, but also to preserve material that the United States government was intentionally allowing to deteriorate and therefore disappear forever. So one of the astounding things about this film is how much work was put into cleaning up the images and reviving them so that they have a new vitality and relevancy… the images don’t look old, worn out or dated, and in fact come close to a big budget studio production.

I should point out that the film meticulously covers, step-by-step, the development and production of these bombs along with their detonation. The point of the film is understanding the horror of this development, and doesn’t harp on images of human violence. Narrated by William Shatner (Star trek) it also features an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra that has a kind of explosive dark beauty to it.

This will be a high definition projection.