This night will explore this through looking back at the resistance to the Poll Tax, exploring responses to the climate crisis through a screening of the film Loud Spring followed by a discussion on what we can do next. 

Bristol Poll Tax Resistance 1988-91

Exhibition Launch from 6pm onwards, feel free to turn up anytime between 6 and 8pm. 

Imagine if community solidarity could bring down a government...

This exhibition is an intimate portrait of a city in resistance, at a time of escalating inequality. Featuring places you know and stories you don't, it maps how ordinary people worked together to support those who could not, or would not, pay the Poll Tax. Years of widespread and inspiring organising are set out through archival ephemera, first hand accounts, and unseen photographs by acclaimed photographer Mark Simmons.

Film: The Loud Spring - Collective Paths Out of the climate crisis 

8pm followed by discussion at 9.15pm

The Loud Spring’ is a new documentary that starts from the premises that climate change adds another level of urgency to the question of social change and that both green capitalism or a Green New Deal won’t save us. From here onwards we walk on a path of questions. The film looks at the potentials and short-comings of the activist environmentalist movement and of the recent wave of ‘popular uprisings’, from Chile to Sudan. What chances do square occupations or street protests give us to change the material way that we produce our lives? Where is social power located – in the government buildings, behind police shields, in the essential industries? The film enters an animated world of an imaginary social revolution. There are rough edges and open questions, but they allow us to begin the discussion. How does the day-to-day struggle relate to a fundamental transformation of the way we relate to each other and to nature?