Cafe Kino is a not-for-profit, and completely unfunded, arts space.

We are committed to supporting DIY arts and grassroots activism, and aim to work with promoters, groups, organisations, and individuals who share the qualities, outlooks and values that are important to us.

The events side of Cafe Kino (as well as other areas of the co-op) rely heavily on the voluntary time and effort given by our staff, who work hard to bring you a programme that we are very proud of.

ACCESSIBILITY

We are proud to be an all-ages venue. There are no age restrictions on any events at Cafe Kino unless otherwise stated.

The main entrance to the cafe is step-free and on the ground floor. However, most events take place in the basement area. Unfortunately, due to building restrictions, this space is only accessible by stairs.

THU 21 JUN 12

Catastroika
(Katerina Kitidi & Aris Chatzistefanou / 87 min / 2012 / Greece)

7.30pm
free entry




In Catastroika, Aris Chatzistefanou and Katerina Kitidi, the creators of Debtocracy, travel round the world to gather data on privatization in developed countries and search for clues on the day after Greece’s massive privatization program.

It was at the beginning of 1989 when the French academic Jacques Rupnik sat at his desk, in order to prepare a report on the state of the economic reforms in Mikhail Gorbatsov’s Soviet Union. The term that he used in describing the death rattle of the empire was “Catastroika”. In Yeltsin’s time, when Russia instituted maybe the biggest and least successful privatization experiment in the history of humanity, a group of Guardian reports assigned a different meaning to Rupnik’s term. “Catastroika” became synonym of the country’s complete destruction by market forces; the sell off of public property; and the steep deterioration of citizens’ living standards. Now, Catastroika’s unit of measurement was unemployment, social impoverishment, declining life expectancy, as well as the creation of a new cast of oligarchs, who took over the country’s reins. A few years later, a similar effort to massively privatise public property in unified Germany (which is presented as a model for Greece) created millions of unemployed and some of the biggest scandals in European history.

It is this “Catastroika” that is now coming to Greece; to “Europe’s last Soviet Republic,” as the MPs and the ministers of its former “socialist” government liked to call it. Catastroika is the logical aftermath and continuation of “Debtocracy,” the subject of Chatzistefanou and Kitidi's first documentary, which examined the causes of the debt crisis in Greece and the European periphery as a whole.

Nevertheless, Catastroika is a virus that attacks not only the countries that radically change their economic system (like Russia) or countries under financial occupation. In fact, maybe the most unsuccessful privatization examples occur in financial superpowers that theoretically have the financial strength to control their negative consequences.

Catastroika can be spotted in post-Thatcherite Britain, where citizens were killed in accidents at the privatized rail network. It can be detected in the Dutch privatized and liberalized postal sector, where thousands of jobs have been cut and mail arrives at one’s door two to three times per day. It can be detected even in California, which left citizens in the dark when it deregulated the energy market.

However, its consequences are the gravest and most frightening at countries which fell in the trap of foreign lenders and are obliged to proceed to mass privatization. The public property sell-off which takes place in Greece has been tried several times in similar circumstances. The same people, who undertook the selling of public utilities in Latin American countries, now have moved their office in countries of the European periphery – and the most competent among them have been travelling to Athens during the last months.

www.catastroika.com




This event is the second of two screenings at Cafe Kino of the crowd-funded documentaries of Katerina Kitidi and Aris Chatzistefanou. On Thursday 14th June, we will be showing Debtocracy, their first film, which analyses causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions sidelined by the government and the dominant media. Click here for more info...