Utopia in Four Movements

Utopia in Four Movements is an epic multimedia performance piece by documentary filmmaker and Academy Award nominee Sam Green (The Weather Underground) and aural mix-master Dave Cerf. Originally conceived as a work-in-progress for a still uncompleted film, Utopia has evolved instead into a one-of-a-kind stage show that threads together a century’s worth of dizzying sounds and images into a deeply moving meditation on our world’s seemingly shrinking idealism. Green, microphone in hand, prowls the stage, commenting on a collage of clips and still images that capture the hopes and dashed dreams of the last hundred years, moving deftly from an examination of the Esperanto movement (created by Jewish ophthalmologist Ludovic Zamenhof) to the world’s largest (and largely empty) shopping mall—in communist China. A singular, poetic essay that stretches the very norms of the nonfiction genre, Utopia is by turns comic and wistful, and always thought-provoking. Since its acclaimed Sundance premiere earlier this year, Green and Cerf have been continually reinventing the Utopia spectacle for audiences all over North America, meaning that no two shows are exactly alike. SFJFF’s Berkeley perfoprmance promises many surprises. Utopia is an elegy for the ideals of the past with a hopeful eye on the future.