Friday April 18 at 7:00 p.m. 
Wrenched w/ Q & A - West Coast Premiere! Dir: ML Lincoln / 2014 / US / 93 minutes / DCP 
From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, American literature has a history of being in the vanguard when it comes to activism about controversial issues. The books of Edward Abbey carry on that tradition, with memoirs like Desert Solitaire and the classic comic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, taking on the degradation of the American Southwest. 

Filmmaker ML Lincoln’s documentary Wrenched reveals how Edward Abbey’s anarchistic spirit and riotous novels influenced and helped guide the nascent environmental movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. Through interviews, archival footage and re-enactments, ML Lincoln captures the outrage of Abbey’s friends who were the original eco-warriors. In defense of wilderness, these early activists pioneered ”monkey wrenching” - a radical blueprint for “wrenching the system.” Exemplified by Earth First! in the early ‘80s, direct action and civil disobedience grew in popularity. With tree-spiking, forest occupation and high-profile publicity stunts such as the cracking at Glen Canyon Dam, this group became the eventual target of FBI infiltrators, leading to the arrest of various members.