Born in Flames is a feminist ‘guerrilla cinema’ as Teresa de Lauretis once called, and might be probably the most radical independent film in the independent film history in the USA during the 1980s. This film is an SF piece set in a decade later when the revolution is achieved, and a socialist government gains its power over the USA. On the streets and subways of post-revolution New York, sexual harassments and unprovoked and random acts of violence toward women become one of the another casual things, and indecent jobs and precarious works are passed along to women, colored people and minorities. The reproductive labor of upbringing and house chore are taken for granted as unrecognized labors of women which are beyond any social acknowledgement. While women’s belief in the future is in gradual encroachment, the murder of Adelaide Norris, a radical Afro-American lesbian feminist who tried to organize the Women’s Army, is taken place by FBI. Feminists gathering from all different backgrounds, including journalists, politicians, women’s rights’ activists, DJ of pirate radio station, etc. form the Women’s Army to resist statist conspiracy to cover up Adelaide’s murder as a suicide, and carry an act of terror to blow up the broadcast antennas installed on the world trade center. 

Even after the socialist revolution, patriarch still functions and the patriarchal ideological state apparatus remains the same. This film brings lots of contrasting images and techniques to visualize this rather gigantic argument: discrepancy between sounds and images, intercut editing between broadcast image and reality, one-scene one-shot shootings, contrasts between fixed camera and hand-held camera, etc. This film’s intense, fast-paced, and direct form requires female audiences’ action in immediacy, and not in the future. Various genres of music--such as punk, rock, jazz, hiphop, reggae, etc.—are equated with women embodying various differences of sexualities, races, classes, etc. Feminism is the ‘flames’ to cross and to incinerate all these differences. A classical film to pound every feminist’s hearts. (KIM Sunah)​