Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1) (2020)
Mitch McCabe
Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1), Mitch McCabe, USA, digital, 15 min, 2020
The first iteration of a seven-part feature film of speculative experimental nonfiction, contemplating an impending American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots. Begun in 2018, the film is partly a nostalgic political travelogue and partly pre-war surveillance records, deconstructing our past/future/present political moment and building to a clashing ideology.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with College for Creative Studies and Arts Council Windsor and Region.
Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy the artist © Mitch MCabe. Portrait courtesy © M. Lewis.
About the artist
Mitch McCabe (USA) is an artist, filmmaker, and educator born in Detroit. Their work spans narrative, nonfiction, and experimental film, mining themes of class, politics and identity grounded in their native Midwest. They received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA from New York University. Their short and feature films have screened at numerous venues worldwide, including Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Sheffield DocFest, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Kurzfilmtage Winterhür, New York Film Festival, AFI Silverdocs, and True/False Film Festival. They are a 2019 Sarah Jacobson awardee, received Flaherty Film Seminar (2018) and MacDowell (2019) Fellowships, and their work has also been supported by the Djerassi (2004), Jerome (2007), and Princess Grace (2022) Foundations. They live and work between Michigan and Ithaca, New York, where they are an associate professor in the Department of Media Arts, Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College.