Global Uprisings is an independent news site and documentary team that have spent the last three years traveling to sites of social revolt and producing short, incisive films about them. Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh have produced 24 films in three years, all without major institutional support or anything like the budget such investigative work usually requires.
Their latest, After Gezi: Erdogan and Political Struggle in Turkey, released last week, covers the year of unrest and political turmoil that has followed the Gezi park occupation in Turkey. The film looks at Erdogan's populist political strategies, global capital's role in residential and commercial development in Turkey, resistance from Kurdish and Alevi communities to escalating repression, and the insurrection in progress in Turkish Kurdistan and Kobane. Rather than the "ZOMG girls with guns!" style that has typified news stories on the YPG and the Kurdish resistance, Global Uprisings connects the riots in Rojava and the battles in Kobane to both the insurrectionary currents and political repression that have spread through Turkey in the last years.
Other recent films by the collective (embedded below) have included coverage of the diverse organizing and resistance tactics that have flourished in Madrid in the wake of the M15 movement, and the democratic assemblies that emerged in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the rebellion this February that saw government buildings set alight across the country. You can see all of their films, or read more about their work, at their website.
Pieces of Madrid, 2014
Bosnia and Herzegovina in Spring, 2014