One Battle After Another (Coffee): Zines and the Culture of Sustainable Resistance
- 13 hours ago
- 8 min read
-Claude Naudé
Oscar buzz, Sinners, The Black Jacobins, the art of toilet graffiti, 130 years of Ons Klyntji, self-care, and small-scale resistance
Damn, I love movies. I love series and books too, sure, but there’s something so satisfying about a short, stand-alone story. To pause the endless input of one’s own daily existence and only take in the bite-sized, carefully curated sliver of reality that the film has to offer. In the span of a two-hour film, you could be a lonely astronaut on a barren planet—your biggest worry harvesting enough potatoes, not your outstanding tax filing; you could be a clown fish trying to find your missing son across the ocean—your biggest hurdle is getting out of your comfort zone (and the jaws of a few sharks), and not stressing about rising food prices, if you can afford having kids, whether adoption is the way to go, whether you’re polyamorous, deciding you’re not polyamorous, reconsidering polyamory, and all while trying to pack all of your dread for the ever-looming eco-disaster into the thought: at-least-I-try-to-recycle-where-I-can...Movies condense life for us and make it digestible.
Why am I telling you this? Well, because the Oscar nominations for 2026 was recently released and seeing as the Academy Awards is widely considered to be the be-all and end-all of filmmaking awards (for better or worse), I’d like to stand still and talk about the stories we tell, how we tell them, and their influence.
First, I’d like to quickly differentiate between what I think is a good film vs. what I would choose as my favourite movie. Film is objective and we all have our personal favourites for a never-ending list of reasons. For example, if someone were to ask me which rom-com I thought was the best, I’d answer When Harry Met Sally (written by the brilliant Nora Ephron, directed by Rob Reiner, and released in 1989), a cozy, clever film with perfect story beats for feel-good intrigue. However, if someone were to ask me which rom-com I love the most, it would have to be The Proposal (directed by Anne Fletcher and released in 2009), a silly, sexy enemies-to-lovers story, that has Betty White calling Sandra Bullock flat-chested. No notes.
With that differentiation in mind, enter stage left, the film I believe is 2025’s best: Sinners.
Sinners, that just broke the record for the most Oscar nominations ever—a phenomenal sixteen categories. Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler—the man who brought us the cultural reset that was Black Panther (2018). Sinners, a Horror musical starring Michael B. Jordan, who plays two roles (twin brothers, Smoke and Stack), who must fight off the spread of vampirism under the Jim Crowe Laws of segregation. Sinners, which I believe, platforms some of the best that humanity has ever had to offer in all of filmmaking history. Its beauty is so perfectly encapsulated in the film where a young Blues musician called Sammie Moore, or ‘Preacher Boy’ (played by Miles Caton), introduces himself to the crowd in song and conjures up spirits of the past and future in a multi-cultural, rock-and-roll, cinematic spectacle. This sequence describes people who can lift the veil between life and death with their music, which I would like to extend to the art of filmmaking, because it so perfectly describes what I’m trying to say about Coogler’s art. In that moment and for the rest of the film, the script, the directing, the actors, the cinematography, the costuming, the lighting, the set design, the editing, the sound design and score—holy shit the score—and every other moving part and position works together—weaves in-and-out of each other in organic harmony—to make magic. An orchestrated push-and-pull that swallows you into a story as if it were reality. That is Cinema. That is Sinners. That is my pick for best-of-2025.
Enter stage right, my personal 2025 favourite: One Battle After Another.
One Battle, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, follows the actions and consequences of a resistance group, the French 75, against the militant American government. Why this over Sinners? Good, valid question. A good, valid question that I can only answer by saying that it hit me in the guts at just the right angle. One Battle tackles the serious topic of civil unrest and political injustices, much like Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), but packages and delivers it in the absurdist, black comedy style of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Wrapped in action, violence, and some of the best sound-editing I’ve heard since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it skilfully turns its heavy topic immediately palatable and deceptively simple. Like you would hide medicine inside a piece of meat for your dog, Anderson hides anti-racist and anti-xenophobic life lessons in a thriller for the “everyday man”. It’s brilliant.
One Battle After Another is filled with references to real-world resistance and its cinematic mirroring. There’s a scene in One Battle where the main character, Bob Ferguson played by Leonardo DiCaprio, watches a vintage film called The Battle of Algiers. The Battle of Algiers (or La Battaglia di Algeri) was released in 1966, directed by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, and in a near documentary style, follows the actions of revolutionary fighter Ali La Pointe through the Algerian War. The Algerian War, that lasted between 1954 and 1962, was a fight for independence from colonial rule between the Algerian rebel group known as the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the French government that occupied North African territories at the time. One Battle’s fictional resistance group, the French 75, is most probably a reference to the well-known, good-old French Revolution. The French Revolution, that lasted between 1789 and 1799, was a fight for independence from the monarchical rule of Louis XVI over the people of France. The most famous rebel group in the French Revolution was known as the ‘Jacobins’, who met in secret to discuss political philosophies and battle strategies to best overthrow the crown. Almost in tandem, between 1791 and 1804, Haitian revolutionaries (now known as the ‘Black Jacobins’) fought for independence against French colonial rule in the not-so-well-known, but just as good-old Haitian Revolution. Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, in his 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, provides a detailed, historical account of the Haitian Revolution and its hero Toussaint L'Ouverture, the slave-born man turned general, who fuelled and guided the slave rebellion into a full-blown revolution against the French rule over Haiti. Layered within One Battle (and hinted at in its title) are clues to previous resistance fighters and revolutionaries that have had to fight against persistent racism, police brutality, and war, war, war. The film seems to be saying that this shit has been going on for all of humankind and even though we think we live in a modern (and hopefully mostly liberal world), it’s going to continue to happen if we don’t keep fighting against it. It’s saying keep strong. Keep at it. One. Battle. After. Another.
With the ongoing war in Palestine, Ukraine, and the global Gender-Based Violence pandemic (not to mention absolutely everything else), it is easy to feel discouraged. But just like movies provide slivers of reality, there exist small avenues of attainable resistance. Take graffiti for example: Its natural anti-establishment spirit can be traced back to the ancient world. Scholar Jerry Toner, in his article The Writing’s on the Wall, uses the famous scene from Terry Jones’s Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), of a Roman guard correcting the grammar of Brian’s graffiti vandalism, to introduce an account of ancient graffiti. Toner writes that there was even an accepted culture of graffiti in Pompeii, where people would etch messages, declarations, and poems into the city walls and onto the sides of houses. Flip back to our time, and we see this anarchist practice alive-and-well on the inside of bathroom stalls. Available, free communication—that lets you literally leave your mark on the world (my favourite page dedicated to the art of modern, public bathroom graffiti is @publicbathroomstilllife)—but seeing that someone is tasked to clean that bathroom, and street graffiti is super illegal in many countries, what else can you easily do? How can you exercise your voice?
Enter centre stage: Zines (pronounced like magazine, and sort of meaning the same—just a mini version).
A zine is a small, print or e-print publication. It is most commonly home-made, non-commercial, and even though they can be sold, they are not necessarily made for profit. Ranging from a pamphlet to a small book, zines are their own print form—often a single page, folded to create eight panels:
Because a zine is often cheaply made and distributed by the person (or people) who made it, it can skip over the (often bureaucratic) selection process of traditional publication.
An example of one such anarchist document is The New Negro: An Interpretation. A collection of art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance (the African American cultural and intellectual movement of the 1920s and 1930s). The collection included fiction and non-fiction, as well as poems and art of the day (including artists such as Aaron Douglas, who spearheaded the African American modernist movement which combined modern art techniques with African traditional art). The collection was edited and released in 1925 by Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes scholar, who sought to battle the structured stereotypes of white society by showing that the realms of literature, philosophy, and art extended to- and were included in the Black experience. A hundred years later and the seemingly small but vastly important collection is still being reprinted—A conversation that evolved into a global circulation. A seed that sprouted a forest. A document that became an archive.
Zines can be released as a limited-edition once-off print, a continual reprint of the same content, or a serial seasonal edition with new content. Last year, I was privileged enough to attend a talk on zines—what they are and the culture surrounding them. The panel consisted of three people: the legendary writer Hans Pienaar, who ran the anti-Apartheid zine Stet; the talented cartoonist and writer Reinhard Venzke, who champions self-made artists through his zine Babel Tower; and the gifted Toast Coetzer, photographer, novelist, poet, lyricist for the band The Buckfever Underground, and co-editor of the South African literary zine Ons Klyntji. The Ons Klyntji is an annual anthology zine that showcases local, contemporary art, photography, essays, and poetry. Established in 1896, Ons Klyntji is the first (and therefore longest-running) Afrikaans magazine, which now includes content in all South African languages, and this year celebrates its 130th birthday.
Where does one start a 130-year legacy?
At day one.
The-powers-that-be’s oppression (and repression) is overwhelming, and the task of resistance against it is daunting. Take a deep breath, have another coffee, watch ten more movies, but don’t be discouraged from fighting back. I’m not saying overthrow your government, I’m inviting you to tell us how you feel.
Go make that zine/podcast/short film (or even start with a one-on-one conversation). Fiction or non-fiction, short or long, many authors or just you, there are no rules—you can make your art about anything you want. Discuss your latest period, tell us about your obsession with 1930s twin brothers, make a fanzine of your favourite K-pop star, and if you feel up to it—start a revolution. Look for sustainable avenues of opposition, of fight-back individualism, that doesn’t necessarily have to rally a nation, but that aims to make a change on a human level—in your personal life, your hometown, your internet following. Donating funds and volunteering your time is amazing if that’s available to you, but what I’m talking about is letting your voice be heard. Attainable action that is tangible (and hopefully free). Give us your sliver of reality. Spread your opinion cheaply and quickly and in ways that are accessible to you. Is the anonymity of public toilet graffiti the only safe way for you to be honest? Then go piss girl. Remember, revolting is hard—so rest hard, be safe, and take care of your energy levels.
We’re in this for the long run. One battle after another.
Queerly yours,
Claude
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