CALICO REBELLION
UPCOMING SCREENINGS:
--Thursday March 19, at 6 pm- Doctorow Center for the Arts
Catskill Mountain Foundation
7971 Main St, Hunter, NY 12442
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--Tuesday March 24,at 3:30 - The Lewinson Center for the Study of
Labor,
Inequality, and Social Justice, Seton Hall University, NJ
400 South Orange Ave, South Orange, NJ 07079
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--Saturday March 28, 11 AM -- Albany Film Festival, Albany
(special event with a performance of the Anti-Rent War songs)
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--Saturday April 25 at 4 pm - Hilltown Commons,
63 Huyck Rd, Rensselaerville, NY 12147
Organized by
the Rensselaerville Historical Society
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--Tuesday, May 5 - the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School, Berne, Albany County
organized by the Supreme Court of New York State and the Historical
Society of NYS Courts
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--Sunday, August 30, at 2 pm - Historical Society of Middletown
Margaretville
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--Saturday, September 5, Jefferson Historical Society
(the following weekend, tour of Blenheim, another hotbed of the Anti-Rent War)
a documentary about land and freedom
a film by Victoria Kupchinetsky
THE STORY
A little known 19th century rebellion inspires modern resistance
In the 1840s, New York remained the only state in the nation that still had a feudal system of land ownership, unchanged after the Revolution. Descendants of the European landed aristocracy owned vast parcels of land in Upstate NY and leased it to farmers who toiled the land with no right to own it. The farmers rebelled.
Dressed in spooky costumes, armed with pitchforks and rifles, the farmers descended from bucolic hills in menacing gangs to harass the authorities in what they called the Anti-Rent War, or the Second American Revolution. Today Upstate New York residents, inspired by their ancestors’ rebellion, defend their environment and push corporate fossil-fuel oligarchy off their land.
THE FILM
The collective voice of the town, the past that informs the present.
Filmed over the course of three years in New York State and Pennsylvania, the film weaves together historical and contemporary narratives through vérité scenes, interviews, archival footage and animation creating a vibrant portrait of rural communities. Local artists’ music, songs and visual art used in the film are all inspired by the flamboyant historical uprising. Nature creates a poetic and powerful backdrop for the narrative and its conflicts. A rare original 1845 Calico costume becomes a character in its own right: a visual metaphor for the untamed spirit of rebellion still alive today in the Catskills.
THE COSTUMES
They wanted to conceal their identities – and created a flamboyant subculture.
“Looking more like animals dressed in women’s clothing than the original inhabitants of the land they worked, the Calico Indians embraced freedom by embracing otherness… With their secret oaths, midnight forays, bizarre costumes, their violence mixed with grandiose heroics, they clearly believed that to be an Indian was not merely to be non-white, but also something bigger than life. Crossing racial, gender, even species lines,
Thom Metzger, “Transform and Rebel”
WHY NOW?
The spirit of resistance is alive and well in the Catskills today.
With massive fracked gas extraction from Marcellus Shale in neighboring Pennsylvania, New York State has emerged as a major obstacle for the oil and gas corporations’ ambition to unleash America’s fossil-fuel resources.
The film uses the dramatic history of a little known farmers’ uprising as a creative vehicle to reveal the radical democratic potential of modern Americans' connection to their land and environment.