Opening Night! Midwest Premiere!

Wednesday, June, 5 8:00 pm

Empty Metal directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer

Set in the abusive police state of the contemporary United States, Empty Metal follows five groups of characters, each emblematic of a different extreme political ideology, as they attempt insurrection against the status quo:

A punk band is coerced into a dangerous assassination plot by a family of militant Native Americans who are aided by a Rastafarian computer hacker who is old friends with a Buddhist hermit whose son is a local militia leader.

This tangled web of marginalized voices is as diverse and contradictory as the nation that spun it, but there is a common thread: all the characters teeter on the dull knife blade that is contemporary American politics, but they refuse to fall right or left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, and under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.

And all the while, the drones are watching…

Empty Metal is a war movie without a war, a nightmare you are ashamed to admit was actually a dream.

“Expresses a kind of irrevocable reckoning that has been centuries in the making” – Filmmaker Magazine

“Filled with energy, rage, and the smallest measure of hope, Empty Metal is a new kind of political film for these extraordinary times” – Film Society of Lincoln Center

“A terrific new film… Khalil and Sweitzer’s film is pointed in its politics and inspiring in its imaginative reach” – Frieze

“I can’t think of a single film to compare Empty Metal to… provocative and truly unconventional” – Cinema Axis

“A willfully Agitational work for exasperated times”- Screenslate

“The film is chaotic, dense with references to revolutionaries’ writings, and one of the more original political films of the last year” – Slant Magazine