Turn your love into a weapon. This film reads Soviet revolutionary and sexual activist Alexandra Kollontai’s writings on female sexuality and emancipation, on the abolition of the family and the need to ‘change hearts and minds’. This reading traces a complex web of connections between 20th century European Marxist feminism and 21st century Latin American transfeminisms, between personal and collective mourning, between a myriad of ways of understanding the feminine, and between the melancholic gaze of disenchantment and the furious, tender, and imperious demand that the Revolution, finally, fulfil its promise.
“(Revolution, fulfil your promise) Red Love” (2024) is the sister film to “Red Love” (2023). The sounds and images from the original footage of “Red Love” have been completely re-edited, and a wealth of new archive material has been added, which is clearly inscribed with the urgency of militancy while tracing careful historical genealogies.
This film is the result of 8 years of research going from Moscow Engels-Marx-Lenin archives to multiple personal, familiar, historical and activist archives in Mexico and Latin America. It is a collective work made by a team of researchers and artists of different nationalities. It wants to inscribe itself in the urgency of the tradition of militant film while at the same time tracing careful historical genealogies and projecting into the future.
