Exile

On February 26, we'll be screening Zoe Beloff's film Exile as part of the event series Bertolt Brecht's Paper War. Following the screening, Beloff will be joined by Samantha Rose Hill for a discussion about the film and Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt.

Please register to attend - proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required, and attendees must wear a mask. Registration About the film:
The philosopher Walter Benjamin and his friend the playwright Bertolt Brecht spent time together in exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This film imagines that they are still in exile in New York in 2017. They have changed in the intervening years because, in the contemporary world, refugees and victims of racism look different: Brecht is Iranian, Benjamin is African American.

Picture them as a down-at-heel comic duo, vagabonds in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy or Vladimir and Estragon. They are still doing what they always did, showing us how society works with whatever they have on hand: words, images, and suggestions on how to tell the truth in a world full of lies. Unfixed, oscillating between their time and ours, Brecht and Benjamin reveal what has been buried in our own history, making connections between fascism in New York in the 1930s and its manifestation in the Trump era.


Zoe Beloff is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York. She aims to make art that both entertains and provokes discussion. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings, and archival documents organized around a theme. She is currently working on a documentary public art project, The Song of the Essential Worker in collaboration with her long-time cinematographer and all-around partner in crime, Eric Muzzy. She is a professor at Queens College.

Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and visiting assistant professor of political studies at Bard College. She is also associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of the biography Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) and is writing a book about Hannah Arendt’s poems (forthcoming 2022, Liveright). She is currently writing a book on loneliness for Yale University Press, and working on a memoir about the inheritance of rootlessness. Samantha has given lectures for universities and think tanks and writes for a large number of magazines and other outlets, including Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporary Political Theory, and The South Atlantic Quarterly.