The Liberated Film Club began as a pirate DVD company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of lost, suppressed and impossible films otherwise unobtainable. It held its first event in 2014 with Thurston Moore & Eva Prinz's Ecstatic Peace Library, and in 2016 curated a month-long season at Close-Up, with guests including John Akomfrah, Andrea Zimmerman, Tony Grisoni, Shama Khanna and Ben Rivers (a documenting book was later published by purge.xxx). Neither the guests introducing, nor the audience, knew which film was screening. This format is adopted and adapted now as a monthly fixture at Close-Up: special guest; short and feature film. "Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it."



We're thrilled to welcome Mania Akbari as our special guest for this first instalment, and a new catalogue of lost and suppressed cinema will be available for attendees on the night.

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Mania Akbari is an Iranian filmmaker, actress, artist and writer whose works mostly deal with themes of sexual identity, women, marriage, abortion, infidelity and lesbianism. As an actress, she is probably best known for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten. Her film works include 20 Fingers, One. Two. One, From Tehran to London and Life May Be (with Mark Cousins), and have been the subject of retrospectives at BFI, DFI, Oldenburg Int'l Film Festival, Cyprus Film Festival and Nottingham Contemporary.

The Liberated Film Club is curated by Stanley Schtinter. Schtinter is an artist, writer and liberated filmmaker whose most recent work, Hotel Bardo, was dubbed by Iain Sinclair 'the last avant-garde anti-project at the end of time'. His 2018 recreation of Princess Diana's funeral (with a Mexican mariachi band in Salford) was widely celebrated as "the people's vote Turner Prize winner", and hailed by London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Daily Star and more. He also runs the anti-record label (anti-everything), purge.xxx.

More info: purge.xxx