Description:

Born in Flames

Lizzie Borden, 1983, USA, 35 mm, 80 min

Set in an alternate-reality, socialist democratic United States, Lizzie Borden’s speculative fiction Born in Flames finds the country plagued by social injustice. This feminist classic is a low budget, grassroots production, a reflection of a long-gone grungy yet vibrant downtown New York City. Made at the height of the Reagan years, it tackles sexism, racism, and homophobia in its intertwining narratives about two rival pirate radio stations run by women, a trio of female investigative reporters, and a government threatened by difference. Showing in a newly restored 35 mm print. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.

Co-presented with the Northwestern Women’s Center.

In person: filmmaker Lizzie Borden

About the Series: Women at the End of the World

Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel selected for Northwestern’s 2018 -2019 campus-wide “One Book One Northwestern” program, this series brings together cinematic visions of dystopia and apocalypse featuring women at their center. Like Atwood’s novel, these four films all emerged in the mid-1980s, and all respond to the same political, ecological, and cultural anxieties that figure in The Handmaid’s Tale through their diverse voices and divergent approaches to narrative.