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The Urgency of the Moment: A Conversation with Lizzie Borden
Apr 22, 2024

Here we are in the future time of Born in Flames, but it’s not the future you imagined. How does that feel?

I never expected Born in Flames to be relevant today. I thought it would disappear over the years. The film is set in a time after the U.S. has undergone a “social-democratic cultural revolution” meant to address inequities of race, class, and gender. I had no idea we would be, decades after the film’s release, slowly creeping toward a dictatorship. I thought we would have the rights we had been fighting for and sometimes making progress toward over the years, as in freedom of choice and equal pay. But we’re facing the eradication of all that with an election that will very likely endorse a man who says he wants to be a dictator. That’s shocking to me. A lot of the calls to action that Florynce Kennedy, the civil-rights attorney and activist, makes in the film, in her role as advisor to the Women’s Army, feel even more necessary now: that one’s voice must be heard by any means possible, and that violence is sometimes necessary when fighting oppression.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8450-the-urgency-of-the-moment-a-conversation-with-lizzie-borden?srsltid=AfmBOorxzf6hnrSz-Vm4X97D_RLVvv37EG6jQJ9db2FCldrP9MISbo1R