Directed by Simon Poulter & Sophie Mellor, 2025
(collaborating as Close & Remote)
Running time: 1h 5m
FREE and open to all with donations encouraged!
Join us at PROXY for a special May Day event in the screening of We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher!
We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is a 65-minute cinematic experiment exploring the continuing relevance of the late theorist’s ideas on capitalism, culture, and the future. Created collaboratively by over 70 artists through Instagram (@markfisherfilm), the film embodies Fisher’s call for collective imagination beyond capitalist realism. Blending documentary, performance, and hauntological fiction, the film follows Parkins — a time-slipped character — through ghostly landscapes and digital spaces, tracing Fisher’s thought from the 1990s to our algorithmic present.
The screening at PROXY will end with a panel discussion about agency and what we can do together: a working group for collective dreaming.
The tagline line of the film is "We are making a film about Mark Fisher, and now that you're watching, so are you!” In the spirit of this, we are requesting donations to cover the technical costs of screening this film, so that YOU can help bring this film to San Francisco! You can make a tax-deductible donation specifically for this film screening, through our 501c3 non-profit HERE! ...and thank you for co-sponsoring this film screening!
MEET THE PANELISTS:
Deena Chalabi (she/her) is a strategist, curator, and writer based in Oakland. Her work explores inheritance, cultural memory, and the politics of futurity, especially how institutions and individuals, through creative and critical work, shape what we all can remember, desire, and imagine. She is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, teaching graduate seminars in Fine Arts and Visual & Critical Studies. Previously, she served as the inaugural Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at SFMOMA, and as the founding head of strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. She has spoken at Stanford University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Museum, and her writing has appeared in Bidoun, The New Inquiry, and the Journal of Visual Culture. She grew up in London and is working on her first books.
Saru Jayaraman is the President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States. The story of Saru and her co-founder’s work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American, and the story of the One Fair Wage campaign has been profiled in the new film Waging Change. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was profiled in the New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2008, was 1010 Wins’ “Newsmaker of the Year” and New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. She was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and the SF Chronicle ‘Visionary of the Year’ in 2019. Saru has appeared on CNN with Soledad O’Brien, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Melissa Harris Perry and UP with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the Today Show, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Saru is also the author of four books including her latest, One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America (The New Press, November 2021). Additional publications include Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, (UC Press, 2020). She attended the Golden Globes in January 2018 with Amy Poehler as part of the Times Up action to address sexual harassment.
* We recommend bringing seating, blankets, warm layers, and a few friends for comfortable viewing. You can also check out our tips for enjoying movies outside at PROXY.
