Can Cinema Teach Us How To Protest?

Can cinema teach us how to protest?

In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, Elliot and Kiriko explore the possibilities and limitations of cinema as a tool for political resistance, and how imagining a different world might help us change the one we live in. Through two films that couldn't be more different, Boots Riley's I Love Boosters (2026), which turns the fight against capitalism into a candy-coloured, anarchic spectacle, and Felipe Bustos Sierra's documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street (2025), which revisits an extraordinary day in Glasgow when an entire neighbourhood mobilised to stop the deportation of two men.

What can Hollywood fantasy teach us about collective action, and what happens when resistance moves from the screen into the streets? From Riley's unapologetic communist politics and the contradictions of making revolutionary cinema within the Hollywood system to Third Cinema and the radical imagination of Sorry to Bother You, we consider how films can expand our political imagination, challenge established ideas about power and perhaps even inspire action beyond the cinema.

But there's a difference between imagining revolution and making it happen. What can cinema teach us about the realities of organising, resisting and building something different?

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