M. Asli Dukan is a producer, director and editor with over 20 years of professional experience in independent film and video production in the U.S. and around the world. She has screened her films at numerous festivals, including the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia and T.O. Webfest in Toronto, Canada. She has been the recipient of various grants, awards and fellowships, including a 2020 Independence Public Media grant and a 2020 Sundance Institute Knight Alumni grant. In 2018, she completed season one of Resistance: the battle of philadelphia, a near-future web series about a community’s struggle against state surveillance and state violence. She is in post-production on Invisible Universe, a documentary about Black creators in speculative fiction. She is in development on the anthology horror film, Skin Folk, based on the book by Nalo Hopkinson. She holds an MFA from CUNY and currently resides and teaches in Philadelphia.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
“Resistance: the battle of philadelphia, is an attempt to make a politically adept and socially relevant near-future web series, steeped in the futuristic mechanisms of speculative fiction, but essentially about the world we live in today. More and more, our society teeters on the edge of a structural implosion – driven by white supremacy and plutocratic forces who continue to appropriate more of the resources, power and the future from the commons. But even in the face of this pending calamity, historically marginalized populations are stepping forward and putting themselves on the line, to reclaim their humanity and their human rights. From Black Lives Matter, to the Water Protectors, to the New Sanctuary, Me Too and Not One More Movements, people across the country are speaking truth to power and are taking action to make transformative changes in their lives and in the world.
Essentially, this is the core of the Resistance web series. Originating from the traditional science fiction proposition of, “What If?”, the story makes a jump 15 or so years into the future and ponders the idea of what would it look like if a group of residents in one community decide to build a different future for themselves, in the face of insurmountable odds? And what if these people are different from how we usually experience this type of narrative? What if they are women, people of color, queer, immigrant, poor and/or working class? What if they are the protagonists through which we experience the story? What if they got to make decisions about how the future could and should change? What would this look like as an independently produced web series? Inspired in tone, theme, style and politics by films like Born in Flames (1983), The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973) and The Battle of Algiers (1967), Resistance: the battle of philadelphia, is simultaneously a familiar narrative and something radically different.”