Members’ Night
Tuesday, June 2, 2026, from 6-10pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
*This event is free, and for members only. Not yet a member? You can join anytime on Patreon for as little as $2/month, at the link in our bio.*
After the success of our first Members’ Night, we were eager to host another: a low-key evening that will feature an open bar (help yourself to beer, seltzer, popcorn, Junior Mints, maybe a shot of Chris Marker’s favorite vodka) and a surprise screening at 7pm. It will feature a suite of 16mm prints, approximately one hour in length; we will say no more about it.
Anyone who chips in at least $2 a month is welcome at Members’ Night, but there are still other benefits to becoming a member. All paying members receive 20% off everything in our online store. At $8/month, you also get complimentary admission for one to all shows and, a recent development, the ability to reserve a seat at any event (for $16/month, enjoy free admission for two and the perk of reserving two seats).
These evenings are a small show of appreciation for our most loyal supporters. Two dollars a month might seem insignificant, but if everyone reading this contributed a regular couple of bucks or more, those donations alone would be enough to keep Light Industry running indefinitely. At a moment when private foundations are increasingly unreliable, and public funding dependent on political whim, we appeal to you, the moviegoer. In the final analysis you’re all we’ve got and, potentially, all we need.
Deserter USA, Lars Lambert & Olle Sjögren, 1969, 16mm, 104 mins
Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
During the height of the war in Vietnam, hundreds of young American men sought political asylum in Sweden, which, alone among Western nations, offered safe harbor to draft dodgers and AWOL conscripts, much to the displeasure of the US government. Virtually unseen for decades, Deserter USA centers around a small, scruffy group of erstwhile soldiers as they acclimate themselves to their new Scandinavian home, settle in with welcoming local girlfriends, endure harassment from American intelligence, and defy the wary Swedish establishment by continuing their anti-war activism. Real-life radicals Bill Jones, John Ashley, and Mark Shapiro—formative members of the American Deserters Committee in Stockholm—play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves in a scripted narrative, shot in actual locations, that teeters on the edge of documentary. Their portrayal is that of idealistic young strangers set adrift in a strange land; through their eyes, we visit an idyllic country home, a groovy nightclub, the welfare office, an underground printing press, all the while following their struggle against a low-key counterinsurgency from both local and American authorities.
Though the movie was backed by a major Swedish studio, Lambert and Sjögren display no interest in producing pro-Swedish propaganda. The directors touted their film as “the most radically left-wing movie produced commercially in this country,” and only twelve days after the film’s Stockholm premiere Lambert was sentenced to prison for defying his own country’s military obligations. The result of this unlikely pairing, between the Scandinavian film industry and the movement against US imperialism, is at once slick and shabby, rich in atmosphere if occasionally awkward in execution. Still, the film fascinates, whatever its imperfections. Here is an image from the past—a rare portrait of American leftists living in political exile abroad—that suggests a possible future.
Full announcement: lightindustry.org/deserterusa
The Scar of Shame, Frank Peregrini, 1929, 16mm, 85 mins
Presented with @alfredascinema
Live accompaniment by @kamaupatton
Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg St, Ste 407, Brooklyn
“Got you in a close-up, professor,” says the student, as he frames Seret Scott in Losing Ground (1982). “You look just like Pearl McCormack in Scar of Shame, Philadelphia Colored Players, 1927.” The earlier work, one of the most celebrated race films of the silent era, had been revived in the 1970s, and here its independent ambitions seem to have proved inspiring, at a moment when a new generation of Black filmmakers were discovering their own ways of working beyond the confines of Hollywood. The scenario concerns a doomed love—between pianist Alvin (Harry Henderson, veteran of many Oscar Micheaux productions) and washerwoman Louise (theater star Lucia Lynn Moses, stunning in her sole screen credit). The pair marry after Alvin rescues Louise from the abuses of her drunken father (William E. Pettus), but she eventually falls prey to the promises of a showbiz racketeer (Norman Johnstone).
An elegant study of class conflict across Black society, shot with a nod to German Expressionism, The Scar of Shame was the crowning achievement of the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, an atypically integrated studio composed of Black performers, Italian-American filmmakers, and Black and Jewish producers. Distinguished from other race films by their production values, Colored Players’ movies were so popular in the 1920s that Micheaux considered them his main rivals. The Scar of Shame was enthusiastically embraced by the Black press of the time. The Amsterdam News called it a “gorgeous production with a vital story” that “sets a new standard of excellence for picture features with colored talent;” the Baltimore Afro-American hailed it as simply “one of the greatest race pictures ever produced.”
Like the genre’s very name suggests, no melodrama would be complete without music, and this evening we’ll be presenting The Scar of Shame with a live score by sound artist Kamau Amu Patton, newly composed for the occasion.
Tickets: pay-what-you-can, available at door.
Desire Lines
(Dane Komljen, 2026, 107min)
Branko dwells on the fringes of Belgrade society. Unable to sleep and isolated, he speaks to no one. His only obsession seems to be his younger brother, whose muddy shoes, bloodstained sheets, and murky whereabouts unsettle him. Making his way through passageways, park bushes and brutalist landscape, Branko shadows his brother’s every step, haunted by his strange behavior. As the paranoia sets in, Branko realizes his brother isn’t the strange one. He is. —Square Eyes
Preceded by:
Leather Graves
(Malic Amalya, 2025, 12min, 16mm)
Leather Graves is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between exile and ecstasy. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms. The epitaphs were created by double-exposing inscriptions on gravestones (largely last names), using an in-camera double exposure technique with a Bolex camera and a matte-box. The cast and crew are all trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or femme queer people. —Malic Amalya
🎟️ Tickets at door
🌐 Full program guide at prismaticground.com
What is the relation between frames, cutting, and images? What is the relation between finitude, infinity, and the absolute place where all pictures lie? If past, present, future are mere agential perspectives, is this also true for the differentiation between pre-production, production, and post-production? If mathematics = ontology, can we use the set-theoretical idea of infinity to produce a ‘movie-set theory’? If we can make any finite picture today, what forms of infinite cutting can assist us in organizing images to see the world anew? What is sync sound’s relationship to death? —Isiah Medina
🎟️ Tickets at door
🌐 Full program details at prismaticground.com
Ouarda Ouarda: yet another flower film
(Samy Benammar, with live musical accompaniment by Nicholas Ray, 2026, 25min, Expanded)
In April 2023, biologists published a study proving that plants emit sounds when subjected to various types of stress. These ultrasonic sounds remind me of the silence of our time, burying suffering. Bursts of flowers flicker along a filmstrip, just before or right after the flames. —Samy Benammar
Endless Ascent
(Félix Caraballo, 2026, 25min, Expanded)
A group of travelers attempts to complete the endless ascent. Endless Ascent is an expanded cinema piece combining the electroacoustic music of Merlin Campbell and the 16mm projections of Félix Caraballo. The experiment is based on the reuse of several found footage films from institutional archives. —Félix Caraballo
🎟️ Tickets at door
🌐 Full program guide at prismaticground.com
Homemade Gatorade, Carter Amelia Davis, 2025, 9 mins
+
Machines in Flames, Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser, 2022, 50 mins
Tuesday, April 28, 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg St, Ste 407, Brooklyn
In the early 1980s, a series of coordinated attacks on computer centers occurred in and around Toulouse. A mysterious group successively vandalized and firebombed facilities run by Philips Data Systems, CII Honeywell-Bull, and Sperry Univac, among others. These actions were eventually claimed by an anonymous team of anarchists calling themselves le Comité pour la liquidation ou le détournement des ordinateurs (the Committee for the Liquidation and Subversion of Computers), or CLODO, an acronym that plays on French slang for hobo. “The truth about computerization should be revealed from time to time,” the gang’s alleged members claimed in a 1983 magazine interview, “By our actions we have wanted to underline the material nature of the computer tools on the one hand, and on the other, the destiny of domination which has been conferred on it.” Despite years of police efforts, CLODO was never caught, and its members were never identified. After a spurt of communiques, the group disappeared and was all but forgotten in the subsequent era of rising techno-optimism. Four decades later, researchers Culp and Dekeyser decided to pick up the trail, using digital tools made possible by the same systems that CLODO struggled against. Their resulting essay film, narrated by Dana Papachristou, meditates on the fugitive nature of radical archives in the online age, and reveals that CLODO may, in fact, have never ceased operation.
Paired in perfect spiritual alignment with Machines in Flames is a very different movie: Carter Amelia Davis’s hilarious hellscape Homemade Gatorade. Her animation follows Daniella, a single mom who sells and delivers the DIY brew of the title to a sketchy yet enthusiastic online customer, doomscrolling all the way. Its visual style, Davis has said, was “influenced by the digital grunginess of trans internet,” and it is distinctively, compellingly janky, with low framerates and deep-fried variegations...
Full announcement: lightindustry.org/gatorademachines
Homemade Gatorade, Carter Amelia Davis, 2025, 9 mins
+
Machines in Flames, Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser, 2022, 50 mins
Tuesday, April 28, 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg St, Ste 407, Brooklyn
In the early 1980s, a series of coordinated attacks on computer centers occurred in and around Toulouse. A mysterious group successively vandalized and firebombed facilities run by Philips Data Systems, CII Honeywell-Bull, and Sperry Univac, among others. These actions were eventually claimed by an anonymous team of anarchists calling themselves le Comité pour la liquidation ou le détournement des ordinateurs (the Committee for the Liquidation and Subversion of Computers), or CLODO, an acronym that plays on French slang for hobo. “The truth about computerization should be revealed from time to time,” the gang’s alleged members claimed in a 1983 magazine interview, “By our actions we have wanted to underline the material nature of the computer tools on the one hand, and on the other, the destiny of domination which has been conferred on it.” Despite years of police efforts, CLODO was never caught, and its members were never identified. After a spurt of communiques, the group disappeared and was all but forgotten in the subsequent era of rising techno-optimism. Four decades later, researchers Culp and Dekeyser decided to pick up the trail, using digital tools made possible by the same systems that CLODO struggled against. Their resulting essay film, narrated by Dana Papachristou, meditates on the fugitive nature of radical archives in the online age, and reveals that CLODO may, in fact, have never ceased operation.
Paired in perfect spiritual alignment with Machines in Flames is a very different movie: Carter Amelia Davis’s hilarious hellscape Homemade Gatorade. Her animation follows Daniella, a single mom who sells and delivers the DIY brew of the title to a sketchy yet enthusiastic online customer, doomscrolling all the way. Its visual style, Davis has said, was “influenced by the digital grunginess of trans internet,” and it is distinctively, compellingly janky, with low framerates and deep-fried variegations...
Full announcement: lightindustry.org/gatorademachines
When It Was Blue, Jennifer Reeves, 2008, 16mm double projection, 67 mins
Tuesday, April 21, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
An expanded cinema epic, Jennifer Reeves’s When It Was Blue consists of two 16mm reels projected by the artist atop one another on a single screen, each unfurling a contrapuntal stream of images captured from the landscapes of the Americas, Iceland, and New Zealand. Always on the move, Reeves’s film flits through an ever-changing world of sun-struck treetops, billowing hills, collapsing glaciers, and efflorescent lava, with fleeting portraits of owls, seafowl, snakes, and the occasional human. Black-and-white images, high-contrast to the point of abstraction, share the screen with frames covered in thick, biomorphic swaths of blue, ocher, green, or red. The montage is quick and palpitant, finessed throughout by Reeves’s live manipulations of the projector, the whole accompanied by a score from composer Skúli Sverrisson, which commingles with field recordings on the film’s optical track. Her dyadic projection suggests a strange tactility, and a flickering, phantom depth. Celebrated for earlier works like Chronic and The Time We Killed—movies where the darker recesses of psychic life are translated through striking experiments in film form—here Reeves looks not so much inward but outward, recording and distorting a wondrous yet degraded environment. When it first premiered, When It Was Blue felt like an elegy; these days it echoes like a war song.
Followed by a discussion with Reeves.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing [email protected] at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
@jenniferreevesfilm
Two Films by Rita Azevedo Gomes
Presented by Narrow Margin
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407 Brooklyn
Altar, Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2002, 75 mins
The Conquest of Faro, Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2005, 30 mins
In conjunction with the release of Narrow Margin’s third issue, its editors will present two films by Rita Azevedo Gomes: Altar preceded by the short The Conquest of Faro. Narrow Margin 3 is devoted to Azevedo Gomes and Larry Cohen. It features original criticism, the first English-language translations of important texts on both filmmakers, a roundtable on Cohen’s The Ambulance (1990), and a new interview with Azevedo Gomes.
Originally trained as a painter, Rita Azevedo Gomes worked in various capacities in the Portuguese film world before making her feature debut with The Sound of the Shaking Earth (1990). Her films are distinguished by their remarkably free, collage-like method of adaptation, their probing interest in cinema’s place in the broader history of the arts, and their attentiveness to the specific aesthetic capacities of different cinematic media, from film to video to digital. This program consists of two films made at an early, pivotal moment in her ongoing career.
A commissioned short produced by Paulo Rocha and the first of Azevedo Gomes’ many collaborations with actress Rita Durão, The Conquest of Faro begins with the chance encounter between two couples at a hotel restaurant. As one of the men, a professor, regales the table with a story about the city’s capture, the four figures are transposed into the historical drama as its characters. Looking backwards to Azevedo Gomes’ apprenticeship under Manoel de Oliveira and forwards to A Woman’s Revenge (2012), Faro develops her engagement with the liaison of cinema and theater before taking a sharp left turn—an unforgettable long take set to Janis Joplin.
Azevedo Gomes’ most formally experimental work, Altar was made soon after Fragile as the World (2001), a film released over a decade after her feature debut…
Full announcement continues: lightindustry.org/azevedogomes
For the launch of our third issue, we’ll be showing two films by Rita Azevedo Gomes at @lightindustry on 14 April: Altar (2002) preceded by the short The Conquest of Faro (2005). Doors at 6:30, screening at 7:00.
Narrow Margin 03 is devoted to Azevedo Gomes and Larry Cohen. The issue contains a dossier of new writing on each filmmaker — with our widest cast of contributors so far, from Julia Lin and Adrian Martin to Avalyn Wu and João Palhares — alongside translations, a roundtable with members of the NM editorial team on Cohen’s The Ambulance (1990), and a new interview with Azevedo Gomes. It is complemented by a trio of ‘off-topic’ contributions from Gabriel Carvalho, Dylan Adamson and Lore Schwartz, and Arta Barzanji.
It can be ordered now at /03
Poster by Kate Sianos @katesianos
