So our protagonist is calling to the workers in transit to think about their relationship to speaking out, to think about where they place their body, to find new gestures of protest, to address their frustrations in finding the freedom to speak out about issues, to find connections.
Hold Your Ground was something that comes out of a larger film we are currently making called Deep State. The Deep State is the state within the state, so its an unelected power-base, which operates on us as people, but also from inside the state on the state itself, the term comes out of Turkey where they call it Derin Devlet. At one end it falls into conspiracy theory and in that way it can be easily dismissed, but in other ways it is very clear in things like rendition, in the banking crisis, in corporate forces that influence Governmental policy.
For example, the Neo Conservatives in America were particularly clear about not giving a fuck about showing there was a Deep State. Often these things are mostly hidden away, but in their case the way they dealt with Iraq was very Deep State, including their use of privatised military forces, their blatant embezzlement of Iraqi resources and [US diplomat] Paul Bremer's laws that set about dismantling of the Iraqi State to create a free market suitable to US interests. So for more than a year we had been creating an archive of ideas around civil disobedience and the difficulties of speaking out - what is said, and unsaid, and the relationship with pressures on the body.
We filmed a lot in Cairo as well as in the student and union protests in the UK, and we then suggested to Film and Video Umbrella that we take this archive to the writer China Mieville. China writes social/science fiction, sometimes known as weird fiction. And also hes one of the founders of salvage punk. So we went in with the idea of a collaboration through our archive, and through our discussions with China we immediately crossed over with this idea of the Deep State. We had just been to Turkey at the point of starting our discussions and everything just aligned.
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