Sanja Mitrovic
/ Stand Up Tall
Productions

Ceremony (2017)

HD video, 67’

Friedrich Engels, co-founder of communist theory alongside his friend Karl Marx, spent twenty years in Manchester, the world’s first industrial city. A century after the 1917 October Revolution, which was inspired by their ideas, a decommissioned statue of Engels is recovered from a village in Eastern Ukraine, travelling across Europe to its new home in Manchester, where it is inaugurated by a crowd thousands. The film follows this unlikely journey, while drawing a parallel with the social conditions of 21st-century Britain. A visually striking mosaic of genres – including road movie, experimental broadcast and socialist mass gatherings  – Ceremony reasserts the idea of communism not as a relic of the past, but as a visionary alternative to the tyranny of capital that continues to govern political, economic and emotional life today.