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Jim Finn

Jim Finn

Jim Finn’s movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies’ and ‘trompe l’oeil films’. His Communist Trilogy is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe."

His work has screened at international, avant-garde and underground film festivals like Rotterdam, Validivia, BAFICI, Edinburgh and the New York Film Festival as well as museums, universities, cinematheques and microcinemas. He was born in St. Louis in 1968 to a family of Midwestern Catholic salespeople.

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Jim Finn
  • The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2020 • 61 minutes

    For four years in the 1860’s half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film ...

  • The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Linda Montano, Usama Alshaibi, Jim Finn, Begüm Malkoçlar • 2023 • 64 minutes

    A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity. The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and ...

  • Interkosmos

    Directed by Jim Finn • Drama / Faux Documentary • With Nandini Khaund, Gorav Milos, Dean DeMatteis, Jim Finn, Ruediger van den Boom • 2006 • 71 minutes

    “A retro gust of Communist utopianism… weaves together lovingly faked archival footage, charmingly undermotivated musical numbers, propagandisti...

  • The Juche Idea

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2008 • 62 minutes

    In the late 1960's Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father's Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confuc...

  • La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2007 • 60 minutes

    La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement in their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in t...

  • comunista!

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2001 • 4 minutes

    "You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional." —Cinematexas Festival

  • Christmas with Chávez

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2013 • 2 minutes

    Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and delivered his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. After that speech, Bush was officially a lame duck—the Republicans lost the House and...

  • Chums from Across the Void

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Lois Severin, Isabella Pinheiro & James Mazza • 2015 • 18 minutes

    Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In...

  • Decision 80

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2003 • 10 minutes

    "A decisive moment in American history remixed into the prelude to your worst nightmare." —New York Underground Film Festival

  • Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 3 minutes

    River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a vice president who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to...

  • The Drunkard's Lament

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Linda Montano, Paul Tarragó, Isabella Pinheiro, Murray Gordon, Nandini Khaund, Jim Finn, Cat Mazza, Franz & Cosmina Mazza Finn, Jacob Burckhardt • 2018 • 40 minutes

    When Branwell — the ne’er-do-well, tubercular brother of the Brontë sisters — discovered ...

  • Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Lois Severin • 2013 • 21 minutes

    "Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child also riffs on the self-help genre by reading the persecution of the Russian Marxist of the title as an allegory for finding inner peace. Mimicking the wobbly appearance of Eightie...

  • Great Man and Cinema

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 4 minutes

    Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title "Great Man and Cinema" comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how th...

  • el güero

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2001 • 3 minutes

    "A refreshing look at karaoke, psychedelic dance moves, and donuts all mashed together into a small and swinging film about a man who considers his private thoughts and private jokes worth sharing with a large audience. And it’s unlikely that...

  • Sunday School with Franz Hinkelammert

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2012 • 52 minutes

    During the socialist government of Salvador Allende, Franz Hinkelammert (1931-2023) worked at the Catholic University of Chile, where there was a theological battle between the left-wing liberation theologians and the right-wing Opus Dei Cat...

  • super-max

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2003 • 13 minutes

    "Finn's chilling super-max is a tour of maximum security prisons shot from a moving car, their hulking forms framed by telephone poles and power lines that divide landscape and sky. The concluding voice-over, making reference to Lewis and Cl...

  • wüstenspringmaus

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2002 • 3 minutes

    "'The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy...' The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet." —International Film Festival Rotterdam

  • Zinoviev's Tube

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Lois Severin • 2014 • 22 minutes

    In this tape—the second in the Inner Trotsky Child video series—narrator Lois Severin is back with advice for post-Berlin Wall leftists dealing with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism. Instead of a s...