On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil became the first among several college campus pro-Palestinian protesters to be detained by ICE. He was held for three months, missing the birth of his first child, by an administration that smeared his opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as cheerleading for terrorism, while abusing immigration policy to silence him.
At the movies this year, I was repeatedly reminded of Khalil, and others who have seen their altruistic activism reframed as violent threats that need to be snuffed out, in characters whose plights followed similar tracts. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba’s attempts to expose the lies told in Oz are twisted into death threats. In Superman, Kal-El is investigated for being a foreign agent when he defends a community suffering under violent US-backed occupation. Even in Zootopia 2, a bunny cop is framed for attempted murder because she is exposing an attempt to eradicate a marginalized population from their lands and erase their history.
Unlike those examples (and there are more), the most compelling – and in my mind, best – movies this year dropped the buffer that science-fiction and fantasy have to offer. They gave us stories of fraught idealism and resistance to oppressive states that more immediately and urgently engage
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