Unrest

A sublimely peculiar and playful meditation on anarchy and watchmaking in a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland, centering around the timely, urgent encounter between a Russian traveler – the famed Pyotr Kropotkin – and a suffragette who leads the struggle of the female workers in the local factory worker. Borrowing its title from a technical term, i.e., an essential mechanism inside wristwatches that ensures their agitation movement, this unique tale of love and anarchy retraces the roots of modern capitalism and reminds us not only of its use of new technologies to control minuscule gestures and vast feelings alike but also of the human potential to unwind the clockwork devices of suppression.