Film Festival: The Night When Bernie Was President

Culture Desk

By William Brennan
7:00 A.M.


Excerpts:

On a recent evening, about two dozen Bernie Sanders supporters and assorted bons vivants crammed into the World Money Gallery, a boxcar-size events space on Montrose Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The occasion was the President Sanders Film Festival, at which four films would be shown. The gallery’s walls were decorated with glittery paintings of Sanders. “Better With Bernie—Baruch Hashem,” one read. Red and blue balloons floated at the ceiling, election-party-style; above the drinks table hung a large banner advertising “Bernie Sandwiches.” Amanda Mercado and Zachary Darvish, the festival’s organizers, stood beneath it, greeting people as they arrived. When attendees crossed the threshold, Mercado explained, they were stepping into an alternate universe, “where Bernie Sanders is President of the United States.”

The gallery lights dimmed, a projector whirred, and the first of the four films—titled, simply, “Bernie 2020”—appeared on the back wall. Its creator, a video artist named Raúl Andrés, is on a mission to get Sanders elected next time by posting “beautiful and compelling Bernie 2020 ads” on social media. His two short videos combined inspirational campaign-trail quotes with footage of the senator barnstorming the country. U2’s “Magnificent” thumped in the background. One of the films ended with an encouragement to use the hashtag #Bernie2020. Several people clapped.

The evening’s second film was “2016 Election,” by Brian Hanley, a Brooklyn-based video journalist. In a two-and-a-half-minute cartoon set to an original rap, Hanley touted Sanders’s reliance on small donors, his votes against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, and his desire to break up the big banks and legalize marijuana. “A democratic socialist is the remedy, and Donald Trump is the fucking enemy,” Hanley concluded, cutting to a shot of Sanders’s Presidential portrait hanging beside Barack Obama’s. Hanley had phone-banked for the campaign and, in April, 2016, rode around Grand Central on a longboard with a megaphone reminding passersby of the date of the New York primary. “2016 Election” was also part of those efforts: Hanley made the cartoon early in the primaries; with about four hundred thousand views, it had gone modestly viral. Now, he said, he was considering getting a Sanders quote tattooed on his arm: “Never, ever lose your sense of outrage.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-night-when-bernie-was-president


The President Sanders Film Festival, in Williamsburg, was for movies that imagined a world in which Bernie won. But the event didn’t quite turn out that way.Photograph by Ralph Freso / Getty