For Memory

“The Nightcleaners” is set in the context of the campaign (1970-1972) to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner's Action Group and the Unions - and the complex nature of the campaign itself.

Filmed at a time of disillusionment for the British Left - the reverberations of the fall of Communism were causing demoralisation and destabilising old certainties, while change was also afoot in the Labour Party - Utopias questions what was meant by 'socialism' when people were supposedly saying farewell to the term. But rather than seeking to define socialism, director Marc Karlin instead created a series of portraits of people whose lives had intersected with the concept in practical (rather than abstract) terms - it is part of how they define themselves - and asked what 'socialism' meant to them and whether they believed it to be on its way out.

An exploration of the work of American abstract artist Cy Twombly, using the device of a fictional character "M", who disappears after having looked at one of Twombly's paintings.

The film is about aftermaths and reckonings. Revisiting material for his earlier 4-part series, Karlin returns to Nicaragua to examine the history of the Sandinista government, consider its achievements, and assess the prospects for democracy following its defeat in the general election of 1990.

The Haircut is a brief but searing satire on New Labour’s rise to power.

Composed of stills by renowned Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas taken in 1978 and 1979 during the overthrow of the fifty-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. Written in the form of a letter from Meiselas to Karlin, it is a ruminative and often profound exploration of the ethics of witnessing, the responsibilities of war photography and the politics of the still image.

Through the eyes of journalists and photographers working at Barricada, the official publication of the FSLN, the film observes the problems of putting socialism into practice, with reports on the war, the economy, the prison system and the political process leading up to the 1984 elections.

Marc Karlin looks at film production in Britain.

Shot in 1983–84 and focusing on the work of the Historical Institute, this film witnesses how Nicaraguans are recovering their history, the memory of Sandino’s struggle, to transform their sense of identity.