Democracy Under Pressure — Homegrown Film Discussion скачать в хорошем качестве

Democracy Under Pressure — Homegrown Film Discussion

In the next event in the Democracy Under Pressure series, Roosevelt House is pleased to present a screening of highlights from Homegrown, a documentary that follows three participants in the January 6, 2001 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the movement that led up to it. The film premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and has earned numerous honors, including the prestigious 2026 duPont-Columbia Award. Following the screening, director Michael Premo is joined in conversation by political theorist Cristina Beltrán. Welcoming remarks by Roosevelt House Director Harold Holzer and Public Policy Program Director Joe Lowndes. With a patient and unflinching eye, Homegrown tells the stories of a father-to-be in New Jersey, an Air Force veteran in New York City, and an activist from Texas as they crisscross the country during a period of profound national fracture—from the summer of 2020 through the spring of 2025. As the country accelerates toward political crisis, the film powerfully captures the crumbling of democratic norms—not through a single event, but through hundreds of personal choices made by seemingly ordinary people. What begins as “activism” is seen to quickly escalate as three conservatives join a widening conflict over identity, power, and the future of American democracy that culminates in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. You can watch the trailer for Homegrown and find out more about the film at Homegrown.film. The “Democracy Under Pressure” series, presented by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Program, is devoted to examining the mounting threats to democratic governance in the United States and beyond. Through conversations with scholars, journalists, activists, and public figures, the series investigates how authoritarian movements are reshaping law, politics, and culture, eroding civil liberties, and exploiting systemic crises of inequality and representation. At the same time, the series seeks to imagine new pathways toward an egalitarian, multiracial democracy—one capable of realizing the unfulfilled promises of freedom, justice, and shared power. Michael Premo is an awarding-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist. Spanning film, radio, theater, installation, and photography, his work includes the short film and photo exhibition Water Warriors; the documentary, with frequent collaborator Rachel Falcone, Sandy Storyline, a Jury Award winner at the Tribeca Film Festival; the site-specific Working Theater performance Sanctuary; and the multiplatform exhibit 28th Amendment. He has directed, produced, and co-written original radio and theater with numerous companies including Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Foundry Theater, The Civilians, and the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps on NPR. His photography has appeared in publications including The Village Voice, the New York Times, and the Dutch publication Het Parool. A former artist-in-residence with Camargo Foundation and The Laundromat Project, he is a recipient of an NBC News Studios Original Voices Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, and a New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Award. Cristina Beltrán is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Her work has appeared in Political Theory; the Du Bois Review; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and Political Research Quarterly. An occasional guest on MSNBC, she is also the co-editor of Theory & Event, a journal focused on the intersections of political theory, cultural theory, political economy, aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts. She is the author of The Right Kind of Difference: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Ideological Uncertainty of Race and Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy, which explores the American right’s antipathy toward nonwhite migrants from Mexico and Latin America. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, March 9, 2026.