Un(der)seen Cinema: Born in Flames

There's no dystopia quite like a failed utopia.

Taking place ten years after a victorious Social Democratic revolution in America, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames shows just how short "we'll fix it after the revolution" falls. The film centers around the mostly black and lesbian "women's army", a vigilante girl gang that begins by solving questions of social reproduction, goes on to meting out violent justice to street-harassers and rapists, and finally to armed struggle.

Sci-fi on a shoestring budget, the movie has an amazing soundtrack of funk and female-fronted punk and awesome scenes of New York in the 80s. Not to mention Katheryn Bigelow starring as a feminist newspaper editor, at the very beginning of her journey from radical filmmaker to CIA propagandist.