Arena besetzt

‘And that's why we won't leave until we have the arena, we won't let ourselves go, well, we're all together ...’ - One of the thousands of Viennese who occupied the Arena in Vienna's St. Marx district for twelve weeks in the summer of 1976 sings about such a utopia of social cohesion. They wanted a youth, culture and communication centre to be built there, but the City of Vienna had other plans and sold the site to a textile company. ARENA BESETZT is a remarkable document of civil disobedience, compiled from various film, video, photo and sound material that was copied onto 16 mm. ‘We are not documenting the arena as a one-off event, but showing how the mechanism of political repression works.’ (Statement by the filmmakers)