Antifa Witches, April 2025
Narrative single-channel video, 9:10
Résumé: Antifa Witches is a guerrilla-style, micro-budget narrative video set in an alternate version of Montreal, where fascist forces have invaded the city. A coven of queer witches secretly gathers to plot a magical resistance, debating whether to cast spells that transform their enemies or to destroy them outright. The work draws on history and current protest movements to explore the ethics of radical political action, community organizing, and dissent. This piece is both speculative fiction and political satire, merging witchcraft with anti-fascism and queer resistance.
Here, witchcraft is used as a way of resisting and making their own justice against the fascist ideology. It’s the queer witches’ revenge against fascists, as the queer community, and many other communities, are seeing their existence being threatened like never before in the United States, and that influences our politics across the border which is why we need to fight against the rise of fascism, and the extreme-right. It celebrates reclaiming power through magic and intentionally crude special effects, reminiscent of Cronenberg’s “Scanners” (1981). The film draws inspiration from Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” (1959) for its themes and from “Pink Flamingos” (John Waters, 1972) for its absurdity and character design (though I don’t condone many things from that movie). Here’s a little more explanation on why witchcraft is used as a weapon.
Witch hunts have happened frequently throughout history (During the cold war, The Salem trials, etc.) and we’re seeing something similar happen today with the rise of fascism and the extreme-right in politics and other fields (the witch-hunt is now against queers, BIPOC, immigrants and anyone that can be used as a scapegoat, anyone that critically thinks, academia, etc). In this story, the witches and other dissidents are meeting to discuss how to fight against this as the government is actively making their identities disappear as they re not deemed to be productive members enough for society, have violent tools that threaten the state(witchcraft), their identity clashes with patriarchal ideals, their sexuality cant be controlled by the state (gender and activity).
Themes: Power, resistance, political divergence, queerness, community, anti-fascism, witchcraft and activism.
Concept : The witches in Antifa Witches represent various ideological approaches within liberation movements, some aligned with transformation and peaceful protest, others with direct action. This tension reflects real debates around resistance tactics. Witchcraft is used as a symbol of collective strength, defiance, and the long history of vilified femininity and queerness.
The collaborators are featured in the credits.
More stills from the film:
