What is Democracy?

VTIFF Presents
Host venue: Main Street Landing
Directed by Astra Taylor, produced by the National Film Board of Canada
Canada | 2018 | Documentary | 107

Director Taylor’s idiosyncratic, philosophical journey spans millennia and continents: from ancient Athens’ groundbreaking experiment in self-government to capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy; from modern-day Greece grappling with financial collapse and a mounting refugee crisis to the United States reckoning with its racist past and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Featuring a diverse cast—including celebrated theorists, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers, and former prime ministers—this urgent film connects the past and the present, the emotional and the intellectual, the personal and the political, in order to provoke and inspire. If we want to live in democracy, we must first ask what the word even means.

About the director:

Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director of the
philosophical documentaries What Is Democracy?, Examined Life (TIFF 2008),
and Zizek! (TIFF 2005); the author of the American Book Award winner The People’s
Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age; and a co-founder of the
Debt Collective. She has written for The New York Times, The London Review of
Books, The Guardian, The Walrus, The Baffler, n+1, and many other outlets. She is a
Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and a former touring member of the band Neutral Milk
Hotel. Her new book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, will
be out from Metropolitan Books in early 2019.