Doors: 20:00 / Start time: 21:30
Location: ACUD MACHT NEU
Entrance: 4-6 €
31 July, 2019 / 12 August, 2019

For this new ACUD MACHT SOMMER night in the backyard of ACUD MACHT NEU, XenoEntities Network is please to present Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author, directed by Arwen Curry.

Best known for the groundbreaking science-fiction and fantasy novels, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, Le Guin defiantly held her ground at the margins of “respectable” literature until the sheer excellence of her work, at long last, forced the mainstream to embrace fantastic literature. The result of a close collaboration for over a decade, Curry’s film is the first documentary on Le Guin’s life and work: a personal and engaging journey into both her real and fantastic worlds. Viewers will join the writer on an intimate journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalised writers along the way. Writer Claire L. Evans speaks of the breadth of Le Guin’s politics, naming them as a “graceful and humanist blend of lyrical environmentalism, feminism, and anticapitalism”. The film features stunning animation and reflections by literary luminaries including Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon and more.

Le Guin’s 2014 acceptance speech at the National Book Awards resonates with us as much now as then: “we live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.” Her belief in the transformative potential of art and writing as a way of imagining better worlds is captured in Curry’s enthralling film. “Hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Curated by Lou Drago and Zander Porter.