Introduction

This book is the first collection of texts to have emerged from the Radical Film Network (RFN) since its foundation in 2013. Currently comprised of almost 200 organisations from twenty-nine countries across four continents, as well as several more hundred individual members, the RFN has become the largest network for activist and experimental film culture in the world. The book captures some of the immense geographic, political and aesthetic diversity represented within the network and in global radical film culture more generally. It interrogates some of the key political and practical issues, histories and practices with which this culture is concerned and which, indeed, have defined the history of Left film practice and politics since at least the 1920s. These fundamental topics range from issues of organisation, sustainability and funding to matters of film form and aesthetics, and of the myriad challenges and affordances involved in different modes of distribution and exhibition.