Video, Past Event, Arts & Culture
Born in Flames: Opening Remarks and Q&A with Lizzie Borden
On February 6, 2025, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement held its final event ever, a screening of Lizzie Borden's feminist-punk masterpiece, Born in Flames. This event recording features opening remarks and a Q&A between Borden and Am Johal. Lizzie Borden’s feminist tour de force is a radical work of speculative fiction set in New York ten years after the Social Democratic Party has seized power in a peaceful revolution. Militant women, disenchanted with the revolution and its unfulfilled promises, form guerilla groups and begin terrorist action. Their primary target is the mainstream media, as they attempt to appropriate its language and power. Borden’s chilling vision of patriarchy run amok is less a what-if fantasy than a mad-as-hell reflection of the misogyny witnessed around her. “This unruly, unclassifiable film—perhaps the sole entry in the hybrid genre of radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi vérité—premiered two years into the Reagan regime, but its fury proves as bracing today as it was back when this country began its inexorable shift to the right” (Melissa Anderson, Village Voice).
About Lizzie Borden
Award-winning feminist filmmaker Lizzie Borden is best known for the 1983 film Born in Flames. Borden's career as a filmmaker began when she majored in art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York. Her early films take on hot topics in the feminist movement with visual representations of struggles for equality in race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her later films focus on women’s sexuality, and her attempts to move into more mainstream film in the 1990’s were challenged by studio politics. She continues to work in film today as a script doctor while developing her own projects and books.
Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
