Blow For Blow

Director: Marin Karmitz

1972 / 89min / DCP

The last of mk2 founder Karmitz’s three features as a director was this fiery documentary-style fiction about overworked and underpaid female workers at a textile mill who, pushed to the breaking point by their boss, decide to take him hostage and occupy the factory. Inspired by the spate of female-led strikes that occurred across France in the wake of May ’68 and scripted in close collaboration with actual workers, several of whom appear in the film as themselves, Blow by Blow is bracing cinematic agitprop. “Political, violent, revolutionary… the direct expression of those we never listen to when making a movie: the workers.”—Telerama

Introduction by The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody on Friday, May 31st

Part of Visionary Auteurs: Five Decades of mk2